Science & Tech Quote by Evan Esar

Esar’s line lands because it treats statistics less like a neutral tool and more like a factory process: feed in clean numbers, crank the handle, and out comes something conveniently “true” enough to cite. The joke isn’t that figures are fake. It’s that figures can be impeccably real while the story built on top of them is slippery, selective, and often weaponized.

Calling it a “science” is the sharpest barb. Science is supposed to mean rigor, falsifiability, and humility before evidence. Esar flips that prestige into a punchline, implying that the modern reverence for quantification can be exploited. Reliable figures are plentiful; reliability is easy to borrow. Unreliable facts are what you get when you swap skepticism for presentation: a cherry-picked sample, a conveniently framed baseline, a “significant” result that’s statistically true and practically meaningless, a graph whose axes do the heavy lifting. The subtext is not anti-math; it’s anti-certainty. Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t speak, either. Someone speaks for them.

Contextually, Esar wrote in a period when mass media, advertising, and bureaucratic expertise were expanding their reach, and “statistics” became a rhetorical credential in public life. His cynicism anticipates today’s dashboard culture, where a metric can launder authority and a percent sign can shut down debate. The line works because it targets a familiar social maneuver: using the aura of precision to sell a conclusion that was decided in advance. It’s not a dismissal of statistics; it’s a warning label about how easily we mistake measurement for meaning.