How to Lie with Statistics Quotes

“a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s “big lie” it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“IF YOU can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so. —Artemus Ward”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Just to clear the air, let's note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Extrapolations are useful, particularly in that form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or charts made from them, it is necessary to remember one thing constantly: The trend-to-now may be a fact, but the future trend represents no more than an educated guess. Implicit in it is "everything else being equal" and "present trends continuing." And somehow everything else refuses to remain equal, else life would be dull indeed.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word "average" having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is the average you still don't know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is- mean, median, or mode.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Given time, a cold will cure itself.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The basic sample is the kind called “random.” It is selected by pure chance from the “universe,” a word by which the statistician means the whole of which the sample is a part.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“What comes full of virtue from the statistician’s desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Permitting statistical treatment and the hypnotic presence of numbers and decimal points to befog causal relationships is little better than superstition.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“As Henry G. Felsen, a humorist and no medical authority, pointed out quite a while ago, proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Now the mental test of any variety is one of the prime voodoo fetishes of our time, so you may have to argue a little to find out the results of the tests;”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Whether they were naughty or not did not come within what Dr. Kinsey considered to be his province. So he ran up against something that has plagued many another observer: It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Many a great, if fleeting, medical discovery has been launched similarly. “Make haste,” as one physician put it, “to use a new remedy before it is too late.” The guilt does not always lie with the medical profession alone. Public pressure and hasty journalism often launch a treatment that is unproved, particularly when the demand is great and the statistical background hazy. So”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Now $12 on the $100 for money to be paid back regularly over half a year works out to something like forty-eight per cent real interest.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Now these figures have pretty conclusively demonstrated that people who have gone to college make more money than people who have not. The exceptions are numerous, of course, but the tendency is strong and clear.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“desafio da amostragem aleatória é este: será que cada nome ou coisa que pertence ao grupo inteiro tem uma chance igual de estar na amostra? A amostra puramente aleatória é o único tipo que pode ser examinado com total confiança por meio da teoria estatística, mas há algo inconveniente a seu respeito. É tão difícil e caro obtê-la para finalidades variadas que o alto custo a elimina. Uma substituta mais econômica, quase universalmente usada em campos como pesquisas de opinião e de mercado, é a amostragem aleatória estratificada.”
― Darrell Huff, Como Mentir Com Estatística

“That’s why when you read an announcement by a corporation executive or a business proprietor that the average pay of the people who work in his establishment is so much, the figure may mean something and it may not. If the average is a median, you can learn something significant from it: Half the employees make more than that; half make less. But if it is a mean (and believe me it may be that if its nature is unspecified) you may be getting nothing more revealing than the average of one $45,000 income—the proprietor’s—and the salaries of a crew of underpaid workers. “Average annual pay of $5,700” may conceal both the $2,000 salaries and the owner’s profits taken in the form of a whopping salary.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“You have pretty fair evidence to go on if you suspect that polls in general are biased in one specific direction, the direction of the Literary Digest error. This bias is toward the person with more money, more education, more information and alertness, better appearance, more conventional behavior, and more settled habits than the average of the population he is chosen to represent.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The test of the random sample is this: Does every name or thing in the whole group have an equal chance to be in the sample? The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“There are at least three levels of sampling involved. Dr. Kinsey’s samples of the population (one level) are far from random ones and may not be particularly representative, but they are enormous samples by comparison with anything done in his field before and his figures must be accepted as revealing and important if not necessarily on the nose. It is possibly more important to remember that any questionnaire is only a sample (another level) of the possible questions and that the answer the lady gives is no more than a sample (third level) of her attitudes and experiences on each question.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“To be worth much, a report based on sampling must use a representative sample, which is one from which every source of bias has been removed. That is where our Yale figure shows its worthlessness. It is also where a great many of the things you can read in newspapers and magazines reveal their inherent lack of meaning.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics