If you were asked to share one inspirational thought about data, what would it be? Great minds from all of the world, from leaders of the biggest companies to famous detectives, have insight on data that is truly motivating. That's why we gathered them all into one post. 

"Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore

“In God we trust. All others bring data.” – W Edwards Deming

"Data is the new oil." – Clive Humby

"No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data." – John Sculley

"Torture the data, and it will confess to anything." – Ronald Coase

"With data collection, ‘the sooner the better’ is always the best answer." – Marissa Mayer

"Big data isn’t about bits, it’s about talent." – Douglas Merrill

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." – Sherlock Holmes

"Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen." — Donato Diorio

"You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data." – Daniel Keys Moran

"If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine." — Jim Barksdale

"Above all else, show the data." – Edward R. Tufte

"Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming." – Chris Lynch

"Data are just summaries of thousands of stories – tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful." — Chip & Dan Heath

"Data beats emotions." – Sean Rad

"Contact data ages like fish not wine…it gets worse as it gets older, not better." — Gregg Thaler

"Data really powers everything that we do." – Jeff Weiner

"Data that is loved tends to survive." – Kurt Bollacker

"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all." – Charles Babbage

"Where there is data smoke, there is business fire." – Thomas Redman 

What other quotes would you add? Feel free to add them in the comments.

This post originally appeared on the RingLead Blog.

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