Edward Tufte Thinking Quotations

I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

The point is that analytical designs are not to be decided on their convenience to the user or necessarily their readability or what psychologists or decorators think about them; rather, design architectures should be decided on how the architecture assists analytical thinking about evidence.

Rather, the point is to recognize the tightness between seeing and thinking on an intellectual level not just a metaphorical level.

The central claim of the book is that effective analytic designs entail turning thinking principles into seeing principles.

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible

In general, I think audiences are a lot smarter than people think. So, it's not "know your audience", it's "respect your audience, and really know your content".