Quotes attributed to the late John Tukey:

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.

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

Those statements, in the context of his body of work, suggest that he was a very modest man.

(I need to find a permanent home for those quotes somewhere on this blog.)