The origin of the phrase is murky
1. Mark Twain (1906) – The Popularizer
The phrase owes its global fame almost entirely to Mark Twain. He included it in his work, Chapters from My Autobiography, first published in the North American Review in 1906. Crucially, he did not take credit for it.
- Publication: Chapters from My Autobiography
- Date: 1906-1907
- Context: Twain wrote, “The remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’”
- Significance: This is the reference that cemented the quote in the public consciousness, especially in the United States. It also created the widespread but incorrect belief that Disraeli was the author.
2. Benjamin Disraeli – The Mythical Source
Despite Twain’s claim, there is no direct, verifiable record of Benjamin Disraeli (who died in 1881) ever saying or writing the phrase. The attribution is considered apocryphal. Historians and quote researchers have scoured his extensive letters, speeches, and records without finding it. The attribution likely stuck because Disraeli was known for his sharp wit and cynical political commentary.
3. Leonard H. Courtney (1895) – The Earliest Verifiable Public Use
The earliest confirmed public use of a very similar phrase comes from Leonard H. Courtney, a British politician and statistician.
- Event: Speech given on August 20, 1895, in Saratoga Springs, New York.
- Publication: His speech was later printed in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Vol. 58, No. 4, December 1895).
- Context: Courtney was discussing the difficulty of getting accurate data. He said a wise person had remarked that arguments progress through three stages: “lies—damned lies—and statistics.”
- Significance: This is the strongest claim for the first major public appearance of the phrase, though even Courtney attributes it to an anonymous “wise person.”
4. Earlier Whispers and Potential Influences (pre-1895)
The phrase was likely part of a developing sentiment of statistical skepticism in Victorian England. Several other figures are linked to it in letters and journals from around the same time, suggesting it may have been a piece of conversational wit before it was formally published.
- Sir Charles Dilke (Attributed): A British politician. In a diary entry from 1897, M.E. Grant Duff recalled that Dilke was fond of the saying and possibly used it as early as the 1870s, though this is a secondhand account written years later.
- Anonymous Letter (1891): A letter published in the British journal National Observer in November 1891 uses the phrase “falsehoods, damned falsehoods, and statistics,” which is extremely close to the final version.
- Thomas Carlyle: While not a direct source, the Scottish philosopher and writer (a contemporary of Disraeli) famously derided economics as “the dismal science” and expressed profound distrust for the growing reliance on statistics to understand human affairs, which may have created the intellectual climate for the saying to emerge.