Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the manipulation of information and how statistics can be skewed to mislead people.
Mark Twain's quote highlights the dangerous potential of statistics to deceive. While numbers and statistics are often seen as objective truths, they can be selectively presented or interpreted in such a way that distorts reality. Twain suggests that not only can lies exist, but the misleading nature of statistics can be even more pervasive, ultimately influencing opinions and decisions based on false premises.
In practice
In a debate about data manipulation, one might quote Twain to illustrate their point.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.
Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.
We oppose the death penalty not just for what it does to those guilty of heinous crimes, but for what it does to all of us: It offers the tragic illusiion that we can defend life by taking life.
The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
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