Edward Tufte Quotes

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Aiming at brevity, I become obscure.

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

An expert is someone who takes something you already know and makes it sound confusing.

Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.

If we start to dumb down what has been made clear, where does that stop?

In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

The world is too full of information.

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

It’s a fun playtime. Please, don’t kill it with big words.

Don't over analyze your relationships.

If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.

In giving advice I advise you, be short.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.