Jim Phillips writes:

> And was corrected by Michael Berkowitz:
>
>  >Although this has popularly been attibuted to Twain, it is British Prime
>  Minister >Benjamin Disraeli that is credited with the quote.
>
>  Another excellent resource from this list.  I am constantly amazed by the
>  depth of knowledge and experience here.  Thanks, Mike, and all the rest of
>  you, who thanks to the HP3000, have the time for non-essentials like this!

Well, to add to the "excellence" of the list (I wasn't going to reply
earlier; there's a certain amount of material that you can dump on people
before you reach your limit), the quote was "lies, damned lies, and
statistics", not "liars, damned liars, and statisticians", as you sometime
hear.

And Jim was right. The quote does come from Twain. It's in his autobiography
(right at the end of Chapter 20):


20):  http://marktwain.miningco.com/arts/books/marktwain/library/biography/bl_auto_ch020.htm

And Mike is right. It's here that Twain attributes the quote to Disraeli, but
this is the only known contemporary written attribution of the quote to
Disraeli. However, given that Twain was a newspaper reporter before he was an
author and philosopher, it's quite likely that it's accurate.

Wirt Atmar