George E. P. Box Quotes

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

We think that computer models represent reality especially if we developed the models.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

Politics now is rather like going into Starbucks for a coffee.

There is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

There are no simple solutions to today’s problems.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.

We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

As opposed to journalists, politicians cannot make do with questions. They must also offer answers.

My job in the Senate is not just to give speeches and do interviews, it's to solve problems.

I think the Democrats' role is to be vocal.

I think politics is really important to our lives. At its best and highest form, it can make the biggest difference in the world and at its worst, it is the worst skullduggery on planet Earth.

Words can be an act of reductionism.

I'm putting jobs over ideology.

The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind.

Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena.

To model an object is to possess it.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.