Quotes By Nate Silver

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.

I have to make sure that I make good choices and that if I put my name on it, it's a high-quality endeavor and that I have time to be a human being.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.

I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.

Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

I've just always been a bit of a dork.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

I prefer more to kind of show people different things than tell them 'oh, here's what you should believe' and, over time, you can build up a rapport with your audience.

We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.

Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

I don't think you should limit what you read.

Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.