Statistics

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

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.
- Heinz R. Pagels

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.
- Winston Churchill, 1874 - 1965

What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.
- Jean Dubuffet, 1901 - 1985

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
- Rex Todhunter Stout, 1886 - 1975