How to Lie with Statistics Quotes

“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 an 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

“graphs are not always what they seem. There may be more in them than meets the eye, and there may be a good deal less.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The fault is in the filtering-down process from the researcher through the sensational or ill-informed writer to the reader who fails to miss the figures that have disappeared in the process. A good deal of the misunderstanding can be avoided if to the "norm" or average is added an indication of the range. Parents seeing that their youngsters fall within the normal range will quit worrying about small and meaningless differences. 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

“It appears that the reporter has passed along some words without inquiring what they mean, and you are expected to read them just as uncritically for the happy illusion they give you of having learned something. It is all too reminiscent of an old definition of the lecture method of classroom instruction: a process by which the contents of the textbook of the instructor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either party.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“There is terror in numbers.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The deceptive thing about the little figure that is not there is that its absence so often goes unnoticed. That, of course, is the secret of its success.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics