"The question raised by objectivity is how innocence, traditionally understood to be a state of ignorance, ever came to be associated with epistemological privilege." --Joanna Picciotto

"No one is going to fight and die for a sample error decision procedure of arbitrary size." --Diedre (Donald) McCloskey

"If he is a passionate man he knows passionately that his theory is the correct one; if a sober man he knows it soberly; anyway he knows it. For some reason, however, and despite his writing or talking, he cannot persuade all of his colleagues. The question arises, why?" --Deidre (Donald) N. McCloskey

"It is dangerous to be right in things in which those in power are wrong."  --Voltaire

"In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake." (Anonymous saying)

"Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target."

--Homer Adkins

"A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it."

--Albert Einstein

The microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen--
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so...
Oh! Let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

--Hilaire Belloc

(from Belloc, H. (1912). More Beasts for Worse Children. New York: Duckworth.)

"If statistics continues to make the progress it has made for several years now, if the information it provides us with continues to become more perfect, faster, more regular, steadily multiplying, there might come the moment where from every social fact taking place springs - so to speak - automatically a number that would immediately take its place in the registers of the statistics continuously communicated to the public and distributed in graphic form by the daily press." -- Gabriel Tarde (1890)
[translated from French by Bernhard Rieder (2008)]

"It is only when we naively place faith in a single measure that the massive problems of social research vitiate the validity of our comparisons."
--Eugene J. Webb, Donald T. Campbell, Richard D. Schwartz, & Lee Sechrest
From Unobtrusive Measures (Rand-McNally, 1966)