Be approximately right rather than exactly wrong.

- John Tukey

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

- John Tukey

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

- John Tukey

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 t…

- John Tukey

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 f…

- John Tukey

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 e…

- John Tukey

There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart, that cannot be displayed BETTER in some other type of chart.

- John Tukey

To be able to say that "if we change our point of view in the following way ... things are simpler" is always a gain.

- John Tukey

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, el…

- John Tukey