A Million Deaths Is A Statistic Quotes

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

The death of one is a tragedy, but death of a million is just a statistic.

single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

The truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes, or under other horrific conditions and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children. And though at first glance that looks like a big number, 2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians. The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left.

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

You know that old cliché about millions of deaths being a statistic while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that's true, what is it when you lose something that never even had the chance to be born? I've had lots of relationships in my time, platonic and otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn't call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I'm just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities...and then...

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us.

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. Quoted by someone with a very sick imagination but misattributed to Stalin

There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can you imagine seven billion of anything? I have trouble doing it. It pushes the limits of our ability to comprehend. And that’s exactly why they did it. Like running up the score in football. You played football, right? It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.

based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban,

To justify murdering tens of millions, Stalin is reputed to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

At school you were taught about chemicals in test tubes, equations to describe motion, and maybe something on photosynthesis – about which more later – but in all likelihood you were taught nothing about death, risk, statistics, and the science of what will kill or cure you. The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries, it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London’s Science Museum.

Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?

There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can

There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. “The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.

Quantitative historians who use statistical tools to study big-picture historical trends, created a vast database of research on more than 36,000 slave ship voyages that took place over four hundred years. They found that there was a revolt on at least one in ten of these voyages. That was a much higher number than anyone expected. Revolts were never easy, but revolts on slave ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean were basically suicide missions. Nonetheless, many captives chose death over this exceptionally horrid new kind of slavery. This type of resistance was so expensive and time-consuming for the slavers, these historians estimate that it prevented at least a million more people from being captured and entering the slave trade. So why would a revolt happen on one ship and not another? The quantitative historians couldn't find a clear pattern, other than that captives tried to revolt whenever they would. But one thing did stand out: The more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt. Let me emphasize this point: the more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur.

In other words, the important statistic is the risk of violent death for each person. To illustrate this point, there were 49 homicides in Denmark in 2012 (population: 5.6 million), so the chance of any particular Dane being murdered that year was less than one in 100,000. But in a typical small-scale society, with a population of, say, 1,000, 49 homicides would translate into one chance in 20 of being murdered. As

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

HUNGER AND OBESITY The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.” At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries. How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger. Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight. Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.† The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally. The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising

How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!

One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

Stannard begins with a stunning statistic: of the ten to twelve million native Indians who once populated the American continent, between 90 and 95 percent perished as a consequence of exposure to the white man. This is a catastrophic event, by any measure, but even so Stannard admits that most of these deaths were due to plagues and epidemics unwittingly transmitted from Europeans to the Indians. Whatever we call this, we cannot call it genocide because genocide involves the intent to exterminate a population.

In 2013, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study that aimed to find, once and for all, the link between mortality rates and BMI (a.k.a. is our fat really killing us?). The study was led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, and her colleagues. After analyzing ninety-seven studies of mortality rates and BMI that included almost 3 million people, Flegal found what’s known as a “U-shaped curve.” At the top ends of the curve, where death rates were the highest, are people whose BMIs categorize them as either severely underweight or severely obese. At the lowest point of the curve, where death rates are the lowest, are people whose BMI falls within the “overweight” category. Meaning that statistically, people who are overweight according to BMI had the lowest risk of death. Following the U-shaped curve, people whose BMI fell within the “mildly obese” category had no higher risk of death than people within the “normal” category. The increased mortality rate came at the extremes, either side.

Estimates of the number of people killed by Stalin range from as low as twenty million to as high as sixty-two million “unnatural deaths” during Stalin’s time as Soviet leader. The man who is credited with saying that “death solves all problems” and “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” murdered his own citizens through executions, artificial famines, forced-labor camps, incarceration, and torture.

A single death is tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. ICUs put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that after ten days 4 percent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States and are fatal between 5 and 28 percent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, 4 percent of American ICU patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, 6 percent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death 40 to 45 percent of the time. All in all, about half of ICU patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and once that occurs the chances of survival drop sharply.

Besides bonding, sex is also designed by God as the way we procreate and have children. Again, this is a very good part of God’s design; without it our species would cease to exist. However, kids are healthiest, happiest, safest, and most secure when they are raised by both a mother and a father within a committed, stable, God-honoring marriage. Children raised in any type of family other than with their married parents—in other words, single parents, divorced parents, stepparents, or cohabitating couples—are more likely to be poor, more likely to have behavioral or psychological problems, more likely to be abused, and less likely to graduate from high school.11 Children are a natural outcome of sex, at least part of the time. That’s true even if you try to prevent it using birth control, since no form of contraception is 100 percent effective.12 If you have sex outside of marriage, you are running the risk of having a child outside of marriage, which can be hard for you and for the innocent child. It’s important to note that all of these statistically negative outcomes for children are still far preferable to their death, which is why abortion is not the answer to pregnancy outside of marriage (or inside marriage). But many people decide that abortion is the answer when faced with those circumstances, and the tragedy of having tens of millions of children killed before birth is directly related to the modern prevalence of sex outside of marriage. It’s sick that we’ve twisted something as beautiful and wonderful as pregnancy, where new life is created, and turned it into a negative consequence to be avoided (or “terminated” if we can’t avoid it). But that’s what happens when we go against God’s design. There are consequences, for ourselves and for the people we love. “No strings attached”? There are always strings. So many strings. But let me clearly say this: I’ve been very honest about my own poor choices, and I can say from my own experience that God loves you no matter what choices you’ve made. He is not mad at you. He desires a relationship with you. You do not need to be overwhelmed with shame. You need to receive his grace and forgiveness.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. For

As to his harming a human, Jeff underscores that attacks by cougars are very rare; the chance is about one in twenty-five million. You’re more likely to win the lottery or be struck by lightning than be killed by a cougar. “These are large carnivores capable of attacking people, and they deserve a healthy respect,”Jeff says, “but clearly mountain lions don’t think of people as prey, and this is good news for both people and lions. If they wanted to eat us, they would.” Jeff goes on to say that in Los Angeles, for both P-22 and people, the freeways pose the greater risk. In Los Angeles County alone, automobiles cause on average about 750 deaths and 85,000 injuries each year. In California, mountain lions have attacked fewer than twenty people and killed just three since 1986, according to the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. These statistics don’t diminish the tragedy when a person is killed or injured by a lion, but it puts the risk in perspective. Living in lion country is much safer than living in car country.

Genghis Khan could well have killed five hundred million men, but it means nothing more than an interesting statistic to the next generation. The death count is another figure on a printed page, and with a little effort, the page can be turned over.

It shook me as nothing had shaken me before. I had heard about earthquakes that engulfed thousands, about streams of burning lava that buried villages, about oceans that swallowed up islands. I had read of one million people drowned by the Yellow River, of two million drowned by the Yangtse. I knew that a million soldiers died at Verdun. But these were mere abstractions — numbers, statistics, information. One couldn't suffer for a million. But these three children I knew, I had seen with my own eyes — this was altogether different.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 percent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 percent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily—the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth

A million deaths really is just a statistic at the level of our moral cognition. This dumbfounding-by-numbers blindspot of our minds is one we must make arduous efforts to control for if we are to have an accurate sense of the scope and moral importance of the suffering of the world.

Here’s another crazy game. Suppose the state of California made its citizens the following offer: Of all those who pay the dollar or two to enter, most will receive nothing, one person will receive a fortune, and one person will be put to death in a violent manner. Would anyone enroll in that game? People do, and with enthusiasm. It is called the state lottery. And although the state does not advertise it in the manner in which I have described it, that is the way it works in practice. For while one lucky person wins the grand prize in each game, many millions of other contestants drive to and from their local ticket vendors to purchase their tickets, and some die in accidents along the way. Applying statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and depending on such assumptions as how far each individual drives, how many tickets he or she buys, and how many people are involved in a typical accident, you find that a reasonable estimate of those fatalities is about one death per game.

For the first time, we could calculate the six-year total for the entire state. There were two ways to do it. Simply add up all the pills the pharmacies bought. Or add up each distributor’s deliveries to every county. Both methods produced the same number—780 million. That was just hydrocodone and oxycodone—in a state with fewer than 1.8 million people. During those same years, 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, according to data sent to me by epidemiologists at the state Health Statistics Center.

Today it continues to be one of the most serious of human afflictions, despite the fact that it is both preventable and treatable. In 2017 the cautious statistics of WHO indicated that half of the world’s population—3.2 billion people—were at risk of contracting the disease, which in 2017 sickened 219 million people and killed 435,000 in 106 countries.

The UN report was not yet done depressing me. The next section revealed that over 100 million children of primary-school age were not enrolled in school. One hundred million. Mao once said that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.

digging when she got back. It was estimated that there were more than eight thousand people sleeping rough on the streets of London. And last year more than six hundred deaths of homeless people were recording across the country. More than a hundred of those were in London alone. And those were just the ones who were found. She wondered how many died and never got recorded — how many slipped through the cracks and weren’t added to the statistics.  More than a quarter of a million people were reported missing every year in the UK, and these numbers were growing. Twenty-eight missing kids, though. She looked at the files. They had nothing in common other than that they were young, and someone, somewhere, was wondering where they were. How many were dead already?  ‘Johansson,’ Roper said, his voice hard. ‘Hmm?’ She looked up, still in her chair. ‘I asked what you’d been doing all morning?

Within a year, food production was inadequate to support the communes as agricultural workers focused on producing steel rather than farming. It is estimated that twenty to thirty million people starved to death, although detailed statistics were not kept. Sadly, reports later found that more than twenty million tons of grain were being held by the government to be exported abroad at the height of the famine. Deng Xiaoping was at the heart of the disaster. Frank Dikötter, in his book Mao’s Great Famine, blames Deng specifically for ordering the extraction of grain from starving peasants despite the domestic need.

It's hidden away, forgotten. All of it. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, one hundred thousand a statistic and six million . . .

One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” “Joseph Stalin,” Yanni said.