Darell Huff - Collected Quotes

"Another thing to watch out for is a conclusion in which a correlation has been inferred to continue beyond the data with which it has been demonstrated." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"Extrapolations are useful, particularly in the form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or the 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." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the something. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"Keep in mind that a correlation may be real and based on real cause and effect -and still be almost worthless in determining action in any single case." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954) 

"Only when there is a substantial number of trials involved is the law of averages a useful description or prediction." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"Percentages offer a fertile field for confusion. And like the ever-impressive decimal they can lend an aura of precision to the inexact. […] Any percentage figure based on a small number of cases is likely to be misleading. It is more informative to give the figure itself. And when the percentage is carried out to decimal places, you begin to run the scale from the silly to the fraudulent." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"Place little faith in an average or a graph or a trend when those important figures are missing."  (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"Sometimes the big ado is made about a difference that is mathematically real and demonstrable but so tiny as to have no importance. This is in defiance of the fine old saying that a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science. A great many manipulations and even distortions are possible within the bounds of propriety. Often the statistician must choose among methods, a subjective process, and find the one that he will use to represent the facts." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"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." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"There are often many ways of expressing any figure. […] The method is to choose the one that sounds best for the purpose at hand and trust that few who read it will recognize how imperfectly it reflects the situation." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"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." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"When numbers in tabular form are taboo and words will not do the work well as is often the case. There is one answer left: Draw a picture. About the simplest kind of statistical picture or graph, is the line variety. It is very useful for showing trends, something practically everybody is interested in showing or knowing about or spotting or deploring or forecasting." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"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. [...] The different averages come out close together when you deal with data, such as those having to do with many human characteristics, that have the grace to fall close to what is called the normal distribution. If you draw a curve to represent it you get something shaped like a bell, and mean, median, and mode fall at the same point." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)

"When you find somebody - usually an interested party - making a fuss about a correlation, look first of all to see if it is not one of this type, produced by the stream of events, the trend of the times." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)