Some cynicism

• The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the n-th power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.
       Comment of an English judge on the subject of Indian statistics; Quoted in Sir Josiah Stamp in Some Economic Matters in Modern Life, London: King and Sons, 1929, pp. 258-259.

• There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up
       Rex Stout

• Statistics are like alienists-they will testify for either side
       F.H. La Guardia

• You may prove anything by figures.
       Thomas Carlyle

• You cannot feed the hungry on statistics
       David Lloyd George

• A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
       Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)

• A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him
       Thomas Carlyle

• Do not put faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.
       William W. Watt

• Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
      

• Statistics are figures used as arguments.
       Leonard L. Levison

• Figures won't lie but liars will figure.
       Charles Grosvenor

• I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to digest. The only one I can remember is that if all the people who go to sleep in church were laid end to end they would be a lot more comfortable.
       Mrs Robert A.Taft

• Statistician: Delphic figure who lacks the necessary vocabulary to converse with mere mortals.
       Rod Nicolson - Psychology Software News

• Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. (Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.)
       Mark Twain

• Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
       Wallace Irwin (1875-1959)

• "Give us a copper, Guv" said the beggar to the Treasury statistician, when he waylaid him in Parliament square. Ï haven't eaten for three days." Äh," said the statistician, Änd how does that compare with the same period last year?"
       Russell Lewis

• Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners.
       G. O. Ashley

• The masses seem to me worthy of notice in only three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, produced on bad paper with worn plates, further as a resistance to the great, and finally as the tools of the great; beyond that, may the devil and statistics take them.
       Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• Statistical Analysis: Mysterious, sometimes bizarre, manipulations performed upon the collected data of an experiment in order to obscure the fact that the results have no generalizable meaning for humanity. Commonly, computers are used, lending an additional aura of unreality to the proceedings.
       Unknown

• I could prove God statistically.
       George Gallup

• The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
       Rita Mae Brown

• "Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth, and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. 'Sanity is not statistical.'"
       G. Orwell, 1984

• There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
       Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

• Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than on all other days of the year put together. This proves, by the numbers left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.
       Mark Twain

• I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.
       Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

• Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
       Fletcher Knebel

• I can prove anything by statistics except the truth
       George Canning (c. 1826)