John Dewey Quotes

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

The USA Freedom Act does not propose that we abandon any and all efforts to analyze telephone data, what we're talking about here is a program that currently contemplates the collection of all data just as a routine matter and the aggregation of all that data in one database. That causes concerns for a lot of people... There's a lot of potential for abuse.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

Language is surely too small a vessel to contain these emotions of mind and body that have somehow awakened a response in the spirit.

You cannot explain to someone who comes with no idea of what you are talking about without being misunderstood.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Don’t use the language of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when talking about blood sugar numbers – these are data points, not judgments of your ability to manage your diabetes.

Data really powers everything that we do.

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

Why don't I talk about Big Data? Because I am focused on intelligent answers and not speeds and feeds. It doesn't matter if it is quick if it's the wrong answer.

You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

It is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).