How to Lie with Statistics

No conclusion that “sixty-seven per cent of the American people are against” something or other should be read without the lingering question, Sixty-seven per cent of which American people?

I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty per cent of the time. Well, by tooth paste statistics they do.

Critics of journalism as practiced today have deplored the paucity of good old-fashioned leg work and spoken harshly of “Washington’s armchair correspondents,” who live by uncritically rewriting government handouts.

The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science.