Quotes About Accuracy

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. MARK TWAIN Did

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better

A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty. —RUDYARD KIPLING (1865–1936)

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

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

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

No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind.

But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

The Bible is not primarily a science book. It is not written to tell us how the heavens go; it is written to tell us how to go to heaven. But when it speaks on science, it is accurate.

Transparency and detail are everything in science.

Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art

One should avoid carrying out an experiment requiring more than 10 per cent accuracy.

No effect that requires more than 10 percent accuracy in measurement is worth investigating.

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong.

With a metric you can really go to town, otherwise it is just abstract nonsense.