Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

Evan Esar (1899–1995) was an American humorist and compiler of aphorisms whose work often poked fun at modern institutions—business, politics, academia, and the social sciences. This quip belongs to a long tradition of Anglo-American skepticism about the persuasive power of numbers in public argument, especially as statistical methods became more visible in journalism, government reports, and advertising in the mid-20th century. Esar’s one-liner is framed as a mock “definition,” the kind he frequently used to expose how expert authority can be contested even when everyone cites the same data.

The joke hinges on a paradox: statistics presents itself as an objective science, yet it can yield opposing “expert” conclusions from identical figures. Esar is pointing to the interpretive steps that sit between data and judgment—choices about what to measure, which comparisons to make, what baseline to use, and how to frame uncertainty. The line satirizes the rhetorical use of statistics: numbers can lend an aura of certainty while still being pliable enough to support competing agendas. Read charitably, it is less an attack on statistics as a discipline than on selective reasoning and motivated interpretation.