Wit & Attitude Quote by Evan Esar

Esar’s line lands because it skewers two kinds of faith at once: the naive worship of numbers and the professional pride of the people paid to interpret them. The “definition” format pretends to be tidy and authoritative, like a dictionary entry or a textbook. Then it immediately sabotages that certainty. A statistician “believes figures don’t lie” is the comforting cliché; the punch comes from the quiet pivot: “but admits” that, once you actually look, some figures “won’t stand up.” The joke isn’t that numbers are false. It’s that numbers can be made to perform.

The subtext is aimed at the social power of quantification. Figures arrive wearing the costume of neutrality, and the statistician is cast as both priest and skeptic: someone who sells the aura of objectivity, then privately concedes how contingent it is on definitions, sampling, incentives, and the storyteller’s framing. “Under analysis” is doing heavy work here. It suggests that scrutiny is not the default; it’s a special, sometimes inconvenient act that can collapse the authority of the original claim.

Contextually, Esar is writing from a mid-20th-century American tradition of epigrammatic humor that treats modern expertise with a raised eyebrow. Statistics were becoming a language of governance, advertising, and journalism; Esar’s cynicism anticipates today’s data-saturated culture, where dashboards and polls can feel like truth until someone asks: truth of what, measured how, and for whose purpose? The line endures because it flatters the reader’s suspicion while warning that skepticism itself is part of the job description.