In God we trust; all others bring data.
— W. Edwards Deming
Provocative Data Science quotations
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

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.


All models are wrong, but some are useful.
In the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Although each of us obviously inhabits a separate physical body, the laboratory data from a hundred years of parapsychology research strongly indicate that there is no separation in consciousness.
You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions.
A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Data really powers everything that we do.
Data are becoming the new raw material of business.
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities-that's training or instruction-but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed.
Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the Web like deer on a freeway.
Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores.

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.
I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I'm not kidding.
Data scientists are statisticians because being a statistician is awesome and anyone who does cool things with data is a statistician.

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.
Perhaps... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.
When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data
The plural of anecdote is not data.
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.
Minds think with ideas, not information No amount of data, bandwidth, or processing power can substitute for inspired thought.
Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.
A scientist naturally and inevitably .
.. mulls over the data and guesses at a solution. He proceeds to testing of the guess by new data-predicting the consequences of the guess and then dispassionately inquiring whether or not the predictions are verified.
Data is the new science. Big Data holds the answers. Are you asking the right questions?
One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy
Although we often hear that data speak for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly
Big data isn’t about bits, it’s about talent.
With too little data, you won't be able to make any conclusions that you trust.
With loads of data you will find relationships that aren't real... Big data isn't about bits, it's about talent.
If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.
Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make a difference.