For Carmen

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. ~Gregg Easterbrook


98% of all statistics are made up. ~Author Unknown


Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. ~Aaron Levenstein


Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable. ~Bobby Bragan, 1963


Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth. ~Author Unknown


Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable. ~Author Unknown


Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. ~Author Unknown


He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination. ~Andrew Lang


Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases. ~Theodor Billroth


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


Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches. ~W.I.E. Gates


I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to digest. The only one I can ever 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


Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture.... ~H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire


The average human has one breast and one testicle. ~Des McHale


A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions. ~M.J. Moroney


"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." ~Mark Twain, autobiography, 1904

I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live. ~Louis D. Brandeis


The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. ~Joe Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945


Statistics is another word for averages; which explains why most of them are pretty average ~Basil Fawlty