Daily Inspiration Quote by George Canning

Statistics, Canning reminds us, can be made to behave like a well-trained witness: confident, precise, and strategically incomplete. The line lands because it isn’t an anti-math tantrum; it’s a statesman’s warning about how power talks when it wants to sound objective. “Prove anything” is the tell. Proof here isn’t discovery, it’s performance - the kind of argument that wins a debate, passes a budget, or justifies a war, regardless of what’s actually happening on the ground.

Canning spoke from inside the machine. As a British politician in an era of expanding bureaucracy, trade, and early modern statecraft, he watched numbers become a new language of legitimacy. Quantification offered something irresistible to governments: the aura of neutrality. If a claim arrives wearing a column of figures, it feels less like persuasion and more like fact. That’s the subtext: statistics can launder intentions. They can turn values into “evidence,” policies into “inevitabilities,” and human consequences into manageable units.

The bite of the joke is its structure: “anything… except the truth.” Truth isn’t denied; it’s treated as the one thing least compatible with selective counting. Because truth demands context, definitions, and honesty about what you left out - the baseline, the denominator, the inconvenient subgroup, the time frame that ruins your narrative.

It’s also an early diagnosis of our modern condition: the argument isn’t between data and ignorance, but between competing curations of data, each claiming the moral high ground of “the facts.”