Nate Silver

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

“The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.”

“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.”

“We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.”

“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.”

“The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.”

“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.”

“A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.”

“People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.”

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

“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.”

“The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.”

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

“In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.”

“If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.”

“A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.”

“I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.”

“It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.”

“When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.”

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