Lies, damned lies, and statistics

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a phrase describing the persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments, "one of the best, and best-known" critiques of applied statistics. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point.

The phrase was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Several other people have been listed as originators of the quote, and it is often attributed to Twain himself.

History

Mark Twain popularized the saying in '' Chapters from My Autobiography'', published in the ''North American Review'' in 1907. "Figures often beguile me," Twain wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

Colin White traces the origins to François Magendie (1783-1855). While arguing against using blood-letting to treat fever, and confronted with statistical numbers he believed to be manufactured, this French physiologist stated: "Thus the alteration of the truth which is already manifesting itself in the progressive form of lying and perjury, offers us, in the superlative, the statistics." In White's opinion, the world had a need of this phrase, and many "would have been proud" to coin it, and the origins are now obscured, as the phrase passed "from wit to wit".

Alternative attributions include, among many others (for example Walter Bagehot and Arthur James Balfour), the radical English journalist and politician Henry Du Pré Labouchère (1831–1912), Jervoise Athelstane Baines,. and British politician and man of letters Leonard H. Courtney, who used the phrase in 1895 and two years later became president of the Royal Statistical Society. Courtney is quoted by as attributing the phrase to a "wise statesman", but he may have been referring to a future statesman rather than a past one. The phrase has also been attributed to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.

The phrase is quoted frequently in 1895, but here is a 1894 example: "His less enthusiastic neighbor thinks of the proverbial kinds of falsehoods, “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” and replies: “Reports of large numbers of cases subjected to operation seldom fail to beget a suspicion of unjustifiable risk.”"

A Dictionary of English Folklore claims that the earliest instance resembling the phrase found in print is a letter written in the British newspaper '' National Observer'' on June 8, 1891, published June 13, 1891, p. 93(-94):
NATIONAL PENSIONS
o the Editor of The National ObserverLondon, 8 June 1891
"Sir, —It has been wittily remarked that there are three kinds of
falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third and most
aggravated is statistics. It is on statistics and on the absence of statistics
that the advocate of national pensions relies…" Later, in October 1891, as a query in ''Notes and Queries'', the pseudonymous questioner, signing as "St Swithin", asked for the originator of the phrase, indicating common usage even at that date. The pseudonym has been attributed to Eliza Gutch.Jacqueline Simpson

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