Quotes (again)

Previously on this blog I have shared two lists of assorted quotes to ponder.
Out of sheer curiosity, I took these twenty quotes and asked 65 anonymous people on the internet (via SurveyCircle) to fill in a Google Forms survey, where they were asked to rate each quote on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 being "hate it" and 5 being "love it"). The order of the quotes was shuffled for each respondent so that there were no position/contrast effects. I computed the descriptive statistics using SPSS.

The top five most popular quotes were:

1. Mean score 3.83 -- George Bernard Shaw: "The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to."
2. Mean score 3.75 -- Vaksel: "People want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses. The reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren't evil geniuses. They are just as stupid as the rest of us."
3. Mean score 3.58 -- Randal Monroe: " 'If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?' 'Oh jeez. Probably.' 'What!? Why!?' 'Because all my friends did. Think about it -- which scenario is more likely: every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time... or the bridge is on fire?' "
4. Mean score 3.54 -- C. J. Cherryh: "Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!"
5. Mean score 3.52 -- Yvon Chouinard: "There's no difference between a pessimist who says, 'Oh, it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything,' and an optimist who says, 'Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyway.' Either way, nothing happens."

And the most controversial, in terms of variance of scores:

• Oglaf: "In some species of Anglerfish, the male is much smaller than the female and incapable of feeding independently. To survive, he must smell out a female as soon as he hatches. He bites into her, releasing an enzyme which fuses him to her permanently. He lives off her blood for the rest of his life, providing her with sperm whenever she needs it. Females can have multiple males attached. The moral is simple: males are parasites, women are sluts. Ha! Just kidding! The moral is don't treat actual animal behavior like a fable. Generally speaking, animals have no interest in teaching you anything."

I guess people are polarized by slightly crude jokes involving reproduction...

Anyway, the participants were probably young people in high school or university (who are using SurveyCircle for their own research), so the sample is not representative of the general population. Nevertheless, it's still interesting to see the results.

Edit: In case you want to know what the least popular quote was, it was by Richard Feynman and had a mean score of 2.72:
"The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings -- and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me. I am human enough to tell you to go to hell."