Quotes from John Tukey

This is my favorite part about analytics: Taking boring flat data and bringing it to life through visualization.

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

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.

In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

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

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

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.