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Re: science for all?



If you're really interested you might persue the following two sites:
At the URL:
http://www.yale.edu/yup/qyd/media.html :
Who first used the phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics"? Mark Twain
attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli in his posthumously published
autobiography in 1924. The earliest reference Shapiro could find came from
an 1896 statistics journal that turned up in a search of JSTOR, a
subscription Web site that indexes core scholarly journals.


At the URL:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/quotations/part1/ :

On the remark ``There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies,
and statistics.'':

The following information comes from Ralph Keyes _Nice Guys Finish
Seventh_ (HarperCollins, 1992) pp. 49-50.
``In his autobiography, Mark Twain attributed the remark . . . to
Disraeli. . . . [It] has also been attributed to Henry Labouch\`ere,
Abraham Hewitt, and others. No one other than Twain is known to have
credited Disraeli with making the comment. British statistician John
Bibby once appealed to his colleagues for a reliable source of the
saying. The best anyone could come up with was this 1896 comment by a
member of the Royal Statistical Society: ``We may quote to one another
with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, lies, damned lies,
statistics...'' After consulting a Disraeli biographer, Bibby
concluded that he probably wasn't this Wise Statesman. Bibby is still
trying to determine who was.''
In the notes, Keyes gives the Twain source as _Mark Twain's Own
Autobiography_, Madison, WI 1924, 1990, p.185.
The 1896 source is _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_
59:38-118, on page 87.
Bibby's work was privately published in Edinburgh (1983, 1986)
under the title _Quotes, Damned Quotes, and..._

_Respectfully Quoted_ mentions an attribution to Holloway H. Frost
next to some of the those mentioned above, and has the following
amusing piece on the quotation:--

The quotation, or a variation, seems to be known internationally.
When a Russian citizen was interviewed, following the death of
Chernenko, he began by saying, ``As one of your writers said, `There
are three kinds of lie: a small lie, a big lie and politics.''' --
_Time_, March 23, 1985, p. 21.

Bob Sciamanda (W3NLV)
Physics, Edinboro Univ of PA (em)
trebor@velocity.net
http://www.velocity.net/~trebor
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Whatcott" <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2001 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: science for all?


That's an interesting book ad, from a Publisher's Weekly editorial,
which contains a statement it attributes to Joel Best, Professor and
Chair of Criminal Justice at U Delaware.
But where's the quote by Disraeli?

Brian W