Lies, damned lies, and statistics

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This well-known saying is part of a phrase attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularized in the U.S. by Mark Twain:

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

The semi-ironic statement refers to the persuasive power of numbers, and succinctly describes how even accurate statistics can be used to bolster inaccurate arguments.

Recent research indicates that neither Disraeli nor Twain actually coined the phrase. Alternative attributions include the radical journalist and politician Henry Du Pré Labouchère (1831-1912), and Leonard H. Courtney, who used the phrase in 1895 and two years later became the president of the Royal Statistical Society. There is some doubt, however, as to what Courtney intended the phrase to mean. [1]

Recently however, attention has been drawn to a use of the phrase in 1892 by Mrs Andrew Crosse Cornelia Augusta Hewitt Crosse (1827-1895). In 1894 a doctor called M Price read a paper to the Philadelphia County Medical Society ^{[citation needed]} in which he referred to "the proverbial kinds of falsehoods, 'lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" The fact that he referred to the phrase as "proverbial" seems to imply that he thought it familiar at that time. The phrase has also been attributed to [William] Abraham Hewitt (1875-1966), and Commander Holloway Halstead Frost (1889-1935). Since the phrase was current by 1892, Frost can be eliminated and Hewitt must be very unlikely indeed.

[edit] References

The phrase has been used in a number of popular expositions, including:

Quotes, Damned Quotes ..... some of them to do with statistics (1985), by John Bibby [2] - this was the first recent attempt to disentangle the history of this quotation.
Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists, by University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best; 2001
The 1954 book How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff.
The essay The Median Isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould begins by repeating this quote. Gould then explains how the statistic that mesothelioma, the form of cancer with which he was diagnosed in 1982, has a "median survival time of eight months," is misleading.