When you can admit that you don’t know, you are more likely to ask the questions that will enable you to learn. – Richard Saul Wurman, from Information Anxiety 2.

The purpose of infographics and data visualizations is to enlighten people – not to entertain them, not to sell them products, services, or ideas, but to inform them. It’s as simple – and as complicated – as that.

Any chart, no matter how well designed, will mislead us if we don’t pay attention to it.

A data visualization should only be beautiful when beauty can promote understanding in some way without undermining it in another. Is beauty sometimes useful? Certainly. Is beauty always useful? Certainly not.

The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.

In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.

The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.

A good chart widens our imagination and enhances our understanding by providing insights from numbers.

This thoroughness in the presentation of information is what distinguishes information from propaganda. Propaganda is information presented in a simplistic manner with the intention of shaping public opinion, highlighting what the propagandist believes strengthens his or her case and omitting what may refute it.

Rationalization is a dialogue with ourselves or with like-minded brains. Reasoning, on the other hand, is an honest and open conversation in which we try to persuade interlocutors who don't necessarily agree with us beforehand with arguments that are as universally valid, coherent, and detailed as possible, while opening ourselves to persuasion.