Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Leacock

Statistics, Leacock implies, are the modern costume we dress old-fashioned deception in. The line lands because it flips a pious assumption: that numbers rescue us from bias. Instead, he treats quantification as a more sophisticated kind of lying, not its antidote. It’s the sort of joke that sounds like a throwaway and then keeps needling you, because you’ve seen the trick: once a claim is numerical, people stop asking who counted, what was excluded, and which comparison would make the number look smaller.

The intent is satirical, but the target isn’t math. It’s the social power that accrues to anything that can be presented as “data-driven.” Leacock, an economist by training and a humorist by instinct, knew how easily authority migrates from argument to apparatus. “In ancient times” is a sly bit of distancing; he’s not really talking about antiquity so much as puncturing modern self-congratulation. Civilization didn’t replace superstition with reason, he suggests; it replaced naked assertion with a method that can be just as self-serving.

The subtext is institutional: governments, advertisers, pundits, even academics can launder values through measurement. A statistic can be perfectly accurate and still function as a lie when it’s cherry-picked, stripped of uncertainty, or framed to imply causation. Leacock wrote in an era when bureaucracy, mass media, and social science were expanding fast, turning society into something countable. His punchline anticipates our own dashboard age: the lie that wears a spreadsheet doesn’t feel like a lie, which is exactly why it’s so effective.