There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.

The saying is widely attributed to British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, but no reliable contemporary evidence places it in his speeches, writings, or recorded conversation. The earliest strong documentation is in the late 19th century, when Mark Twain reported the line and explicitly credited it to Disraeli, helping cement the attribution in popular memory. Twain used it as a wry comment on how numerical claims can be marshaled to mislead as effectively as outright falsehoods. Because the trail runs through Twain rather than Disraeli’s own corpus, modern quotation scholarship generally treats Disraeli’s authorship as unproven and the attribution as doubtful.

The epigram ranks deception in escalating rhetorical power: ordinary lies are blunt, “damn lies” are brazen, and “statistics” are the most persuasive because they borrow the authority of mathematics. The point is not that quantitative reasoning is inherently dishonest, but that numbers can be selected, framed, or aggregated to create a misleading impression while retaining a veneer of objectivity. The line has endured because it captures a recurring tension in public life—between evidence and persuasion—warning readers to ask how data were gathered, what was omitted, and what assumptions underwrite the figures being presented.

1) “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
2) “There are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies and statistics.”
3) “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”