Lies, damned lies, and statistics

'"[4][1][2] 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,[5] and British politician and scholar Leonard H. Courtney, who used the phrase in 1895 and two years later became president of the Royal Statistical Society.

[8][9] 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.”"[10][11] 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):

[To the Editor of The National Observer] London, 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.

The phrase has been used in the title of a number of popular expositions, including: The essay The Median Isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould begins by repeating this quote.

Gould explains how the statistic that peritoneal mesothelioma, the form of cancer with which he was diagnosed in 1982, has a "median survival time of eight months" is misleading.