John Tukey Quotes

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

Statistics is the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science and of every art: the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organization based on experience, for it only gives results of our experience.

Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go and informed by fairly good judgment.

[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

[Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

Statistics are there to be broken.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

I've never been a stat guy.

Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

I think you can have a ridiculously enormous and complex data set, but if you have the right tools and methodology then it's not a problem.

I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what's the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.