Statistics

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once offered a bit of advice to a youngster whose


ambitions included a seat in Parliament. "The first lesson that you must learn," he told the chap, "is

[that] when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer

babies died when I was prime minister than when anyone else was prime minister. That is a political

statistic."

-Government by the Numbers: Reliable or Not? (K. Daniel Glover, Intellectual Capital)