JOHN TUKEY

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

If we are going to make a mark (key 21), it might as well be a meaningful one.

To be able to say that "if we change our point of view in the following way ... things are simpler" is always a gain.

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

I know of no person or group that is taking nearly adequate advantage of the graphical potentialities of the computer.

In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'

Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

An approximate answer to the right question is worth far more than a precise answer to the wrong one.

In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

I know of no person or group that is taking nearly adequate advantage of the graphical potentialities of the computer.

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.

To be able to say that "if we change our point of view in the following way ... things are simpler" is always a gain.

Be approximately right rather than exactly wrong.

If we are going to make a mark (key 21), it might as well be a meaningful one.

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.