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)