Statistical Topics

Today the two cities seem to stand in contrast to each another. Florence has become a bustling and vital modern city. Whilst it may no longer nurture Michelangelos and Botticellis, there are native Florentine painters of international renown. Its ancient craft of leatherwork plays a distinctive role in contemporary fashion, and Florentines have effectively revived the old skills with stuffs and dyes and organized their distribution on a scale which dwarfs the network of the once ubiquitous Medici banks. Venice instead is apparently a city belonging only to her past, an empty shell of former glories. Its native population diminishes constantly, deserting the island for the industrial wasteland that threatens to destroy what is left of millennial grandeur. Its last remaining industry makes baubles for the tourists who come in droves to stay on a statistical average of eighteen hours, to mill about and to gawk at the remaining relics of the Seremissima’s magnificence.
—Peter Lauritzen. Venice: A Thousand Years of Culture and Civilization, preface, Atheneum (1978)

The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.
—John Boyle O’Reilly (1844–1890)

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)