To elaborate on what other have said: it's not meant to be taken literally. There will of course be cases (e.g. the LHC) where it's imperative to do precise statistics because it's so expensive to make a measurement and only a few measurements can be reasonably made. But the idea of the quote is that often a researcher is going to be wasting his time if the effect he is looking at is so small as to require heavy duty statistics; the fancy statistical machinery can be a time-sink and distraction from the fact that the underlying effect isn't that interesting.