"lies, damned lies, and statistics" 1856??

[Jonathan Lighter]

My gut feeling from the conversational style is that this excerpt is more likely to be from the 20th C.

  JL

Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Stephen Goranson
Subject: "lies, damned lies, and statistics" 1856??
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Report of Select Committee in Relation to U.S. Land Commissioners
[Google Books
snippet and small title page that seems to match the WorldCat description for
1856, though google gives 1845; Google gives as page 25 though WorldCat and
Google say 11 pages; Stanford Law copy]. By California Legislature. Assembly
1845? 1856?

...before attempting to juggle with legal technicalies. Of course, facts as we
all know, are extremely difficult to get at, and I think that anyone who has
dealt with any aspect of our land law will know how difficult it is to come by
reliable statistics in this sort of thing. When you try to investigate these
problems in this country, you almost invariably come up against the
hurdle that
either no adequate statistics exist or,... It has been said that there are
three kinds of untruths--lies, damned lies and statistics, but one has to face
the fact that although statistics are subject...

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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