Quotes by George Box

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


Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad.


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


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


The only way to find out what will happen when a complex system is disturbed is to disturb the system, not merely to observe it passively.


What's the collective noun for a group of statisticians?

"A quarrel"


The quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.


Every process generates information that can be used to improve it.


For the theory-practice iteration to work, the scientist must be, as it were, mentally ambidextrous; fascinated equally on the one hand by possible meanings, theories, and tentative models to be induced from data and the practical reality of the real world, and on the other with the factual implications deducible from tentative theories, models and hypotheses.


Acceleration of knowledge generation also emphasizes the need for life long education. The trained teacher, scientist or engineer can no longer regard what they have learned at the university as supplying their needs for the rest of their lives.