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

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

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.

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

The only way to know how a complex system will behave-after you modify it-is to modify it and see how it behaves.

Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

To find out what happens to a system when you interfere with it you have to interfere with it (not just passively observe it).

The management system which makes only a pretense of valuing employee involvement and encouraging employee empowerment merely breeds cynicism.

Management must provide employees with tools that will enable them to do their jobs better, and with encouragement to use these tools. In particular, they must collect data.

​The destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they feed themselves.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read

If you need a gun to do it with, you aren't doing it right." Sheriff Bud Smith.

Park your ego and listen to your readers. They can be your best friend or your worst enemy. But chances are you'll learn something from them.

To see a shadow and think it is a tree-that is a pity but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal.

Successful people make their decisions quickly and change their minds slowly. Failures make their decisions slowly and change their minds quickly.

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.

I appreciate and enjoy my age.

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many.