John Tukey Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Visualization is often used for evil - twisting insignificant data changes and making them look meaningful. Don't do that crap if you want to be my friend. Present results clearly and honestly. If something isn't working - those reviewing results need to know.

Be approximately right rather than exactly wrong.

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

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