Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Lang

Statistics, in Lang's hands, become less a tool of truth than a prop for the already-convinced. The image is doing most of the work: a drunken man gripping a lamppost isn't guided by its light; he's trying not to fall. Lang's jab lands because it reduces a revered symbol of modern authority - numbers - to something embarrassingly physical. It isn't just that people misuse data; it's that they cling to it for balance when their arguments wobble.

The subtext is a critique of rhetoric dressed up as empiricism. "Support" implies preexisting bias and a desperate need for reinforcement, while "illumination" suggests the harder discipline of being changed by evidence. Lang is pointing at a familiar performance: cherry-picked figures deployed to end conversation, to project seriousness, to intimidate opponents with the aura of objectivity. It's a warning about the psychology of persuasion as much as the mechanics of math.

Context matters. Lang lived through the late Victorian boom in quantification: censuses, social statistics, actuarial thinking, the rising prestige of scientific method in public debate. Numbers were becoming a new secular scripture, and Lang, a poet with a critic's eye, skewers the faith that measurement automatically equals understanding. The joke's sting is that it still fits: the modern lamppost is a dashboard, a poll, a graph shared with absolute confidence. The punchline isn't anti-statistics; it's anti-self-deception, a reminder that data can steady a narrative without lighting the way forward.