“To be effective and competitive, the challenge is to integrate many disciplines.”

“"The History of Science has suffered greatly from the use by teachers of second-hand material, and the consequent obliteration of the circumstances and the intellectual atmosphere in which the great discoveries of the past were made. A first-hand study is always instructive, and often ... full of surprises." ”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Knowledge is affected by rules of inference.”

“Three ways of presenting experimental data a) as original data b) as interpretive predictions and c) as knowledge.”

“Hope for instant pudding ...the supposition that one or two consultations with a competent statistician will set the company on the road to quality and productivity--instant pudding. It is not so simple: it will be necessary to study and to go to work.”

“One must learn by doing the things; for though you think it, you have no certainty until you TRY.”

“Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals.”

“And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race['s] experience from the past.”

“There are only seeming causes leading to apparent effects. Since nothing truly follows from anything else, we swim each day through seas of chaos.”

“Science is not any particular method or set of techniques. It is a way of reasoning. The standards are intellectual rather than procedural. The method of observation, formalization, and testing must vary with the nature of the problem.”

“Only when the treatments in the experiment are applied by the experimenter using the randomization procedure is the chain of inductive reasoning sound; it is only under these circumstances that the experimenter can attribute whatever effects he observes to the treatment and to the treatment only. Under these circumstances his conclusions are reliable in the statistical sense.”

“To define is to kill; to suggest is to create.”

“Hunches and intuitive impressions are essential for getting the work started but it is only through the quality of numbers at the end that the truth can be told.”

“Measurements Get Attention.”

“Chance favors the trained mind.”

“A substantial part of the skill of the experimenter lies in his choice of factors to be randomized out of the experiment. If he is careful, he will randomize out all of the factors which are suspected to be causally important but which are not actually part of the experimental structure. But every experimenter necessarily neglects some conceivably causal factors; if this were not so, the randomization procedure required would be impossibly complicated.”

“I know that most men, even those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious of truths, if it would be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven thread by thread.”

“Unfortunately, future experiments (future trials, tomorrow's production) will be affected by environmental conditions (temperature, materials, people) different from those that affect this experiment. It is only by knowledge of the subject matter, possibly aided by further experiments (italics added) to cover a wider range of conditions, that one may decide, with a risk of being wrong, whether the environmental conditions of the future will be near enough the same as those of today to permit use of results in hand.”

“Some conditions must be controlled; some at least one, must be varied deliberately, not just passively observed. To avoid Chantecler's mistake, the variation should not be regular. (You will remember that Rostand's cock thought it was his crowing that made the sun rise).”

“My two ears ache from all your worthless speech.”

“For indeed, he that preaches to those that have ears but hear not makes of himself a nuisance.”

“Two equally competent investigators presented with the same problem would typically begin from different starting points, proceed by different routes, and yet could reach the same answer. What is sought is not uniformity but convergence.”

“On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

“If the experimental design is poorly chosen, so that the resultant data do not contain much information, not much can be extracted, no matter how thorough or sophisticated the analysis.”

“I recognize Geometry (i.e. mathematics) to be so useless that I can find little difference between a man who is a geometrician and a clever craftsman. Although I call it the best craft in the world it is, after all, nothing else but a craft.”

“Everything should be done as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

“If you cannot measure, you cannot improve!”