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Who really said it

Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Do Figure

Nobody, traceably — an anonymous American proverb Unknown — in print unattributed by 1884 First documented 1884 · author never identified
Wright is credited because he said it well, not because he said it first Free to reuse

The saying was already circulating before any of the men credited with it used it. Its earliest known printing, in a North Dakota paper in February 1884, runs it in with a handful of other aphorisms and names nobody. When the statistician Carroll D. Wright used it five years later in his opening address to a national convention of labour statisticians, he introduced the punchline as “a new saying” — which is an author disclaiming authorship. The credit attached to him anyway, within six years.

Last verified 10 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Do Figure” This is an anonymous American proverb. Quote Investigator's earliest printing is the Grand Forks Daily Herald of 29 February 1884, where it appears among other aphorisms with no author named. The statistician Carroll D. Wright used it in his opening address to the Convention of Commissioners of Bureaus of Statistics of Labor on 25 June 1889 — but called it “a new saying”, crediting himself with nothing: “The old saying is that 'figures will not lie,' but a new saying is 'liars will figure.'”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Carroll D. Wright. Use the credit shown above instead.

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Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

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In context

Evoking the themes of truth, power and character. Theme: "Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Do Figure". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Do Figure". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest printing
Grand Forks Daily Herald — “The Fire Laddies: The Great Public Benefit”
Published
29 February 1884, page 1, Grand Forks, North Dakota — no attribution
Wright’s use
25 June 1889, opening address to the Convention of Commissioners of Bureaus of Statistics of Labor
What Wright called it
“a new saying” — he claimed no credit for it

The old saying is that “figures will not lie,” but a new saying is “liars will figure.” It is our duty, as practical statisticians, to prevent the liar from figuring; in other words, to prevent him from perverting the truth, in the interest of some theory he wishes to establish. We can only do this by being absolutely fair ourselves.

This is Wright in 1889 — the passage that made the proverb famous and got him the credit. Read the second clause again: he is quoting, not coining. The wording people use today (“figures don’t lie, but liars do figure”) is the 1884 newspaper form, not Wright’s.

Quote Investigator: figures, liars and the 1884 earliest printing

How we verified this

  • The chronology, from 1852 precursors to the 1913 Mark Twain misattribution, is Quote Investigator’s ↗. Its earliest full-proverb citation is the Grand Forks Daily Herald of 29 February 1884, where the line sits among unattributed aphorisms; its conclusion is that the saying “is not attributed to anyone in the earliest occurrences” and that Wright “did use the saying during a high-profile speech in 1889, but he did not craft it.”
  • Wright’s own words are the strongest evidence against his authorship. Quote Investigator quotes two published versions of the 25 June 1889 address, prefers the fuller one, and cites it to a Michigan state labour-statistics report at page 311 — the full-view volume it links ↗, which we confirmed resolves. In that version Wright labels the punchline “a new saying”.
  • We independently confirmed that the proverb was still circulating anonymously after Wright’s speech. The Saratoga Sun of Saratoga, Wyoming, 17 August 1899, page 4, runs a political item headed “Liars Will Figure.” ending “Figures won’t lie, but liars will figure” and credits it to another newspaper, the Douglas Budget — no Wright, no Twain. We read this in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America page scan via its own OCR text service.
  • The two biggest misattributions both postdate the proverb substantially: the first ascription to Wright that Quote Investigator located is 1895, and the first to Mark Twain is a Boston medical journal of 2 October 1913 — three years after Twain’s death, and with nothing corroborating it in Twain’s own writings.
Public domain

The proverb’s earliest documented printing is an 1884 newspaper item and Wright’s speech was published in an 1890 state government report — both far earlier than the 1931 United States cutoff, and both in the public domain. The 1899 Saratoga Sun page quoted above is likewise public domain. No author has ever been identified to hold rights in the sentence itself.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

A proverb about the misuse of numbers has been misattributed with some consistency. Four names have carried it; the earliest printing carries none.

Carroll D. Wright Quoted it in 1889 — and said so

Wright used the proverb in his opening address to the Convention of Commissioners of Bureaus of Statistics of Labor on 25 June 1889, introducing the punchline as “a new saying”. By 1895 The Inland Printer was calling it “Carroll D. Wright’s saying”, and an 1898 New Hampshire state report declared flatly that “It was he who originated the now famous and much misquoted saying.”

Mark Twain First credited in 1913 — after his death

The earliest Twain ascription Quote Investigator located is the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 2 October 1913, calling it “that other famous saying of Mark Twain”. Twain died in April 1910 ↗, three years earlier, and there is no corroborating evidence in his own writings. Wikiquote’s sourced Twain page ↗ does not carry it either.

Charles H. Grosvenor

Some reference works credit the Ohio congressman, nicknamed “Old Figures”. Quote Investigator found no solid evidence — and notes the telling detail that when James Tanner used the proverb at a 1910 banquet in Grosvenor’s presence, he called it an “old-time maxim, as old as the ages” rather than crediting the man sitting there.

James G. Blaine

A 1910 volume of railway-commission proceedings attributed it to “late James G. Blaine” — one more posthumous credit, twenty-six years after the proverb was already in print.

The oldest known printing, in the Grand Forks Daily Herald of 29 February 1884, gives no author at all — and the man usually credited called the line “a new saying” when he borrowed it five years later. Quote Investigator ↗: “QI has not found any solid evidence for crediting the phrase to any specific individual.”

Context

Why it mattered

The proverb arrived with official statistics themselves. The 1870s and 1880s were when American states and then the federal government built permanent statistical bureaus — Wright ran Massachusetts’s from 1873 and became the first U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1885 — and the question of whether their numbers could be trusted was live and partisan. The wordplay — same two words, swapped around — put the problem in seven words: the arithmetic is innocent, the arithmetician may not be.

Which is why the attribution to Carroll D. Wright was so easy to believe. He ran the first federal labour statistics office, and he used the line to tell his own profession that its duty was “to prevent the liar from figuring”. It is the perfect quotation for him — it simply was not his.

The man credited with it called it “a new saying” — five years after it was already in print.

Read the full story

Quote Investigator traces the idea back through pedestrian ancestors that lack the wordplay: an 1852 congressional debate (“figures never lie, though men sometimes do”), an 1852 magazine essay wrestling with the proverb “figures won’t lie”, and an 1854 Hartford paper’s “Figures won’t lie; but men that draw up the tables may.” The compressed modern form appears fully formed in 1884 and then spreads fast — a July 1888 Los Angeles lecture, an October 1888 Sacramento free-trade argument, and a string of 1889–1890s uses with no author attached.

The form itself is unstable, which is part of why the credit wanders. As Quote Investigator notes, the first half appears as figures won’t lie, can not lie, don’t lie, do not lie, will not lie and would not lie; the second as liars do figure, will figure, can figure, sometimes figure and figure. The version in this page’s title is the 1884 newspaper’s. Wright’s was “liars will figure”, and the 1899 Wyoming item we read used his wording while crediting a different newspaper entirely.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Power Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: figures don’t lie, but liars do figurequoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: 1852 precursors, the unattributed 1884 earliest printing, both versions of Wright’s 1889 speech, and the Twain, Grosvenor and Blaine misattributions.
Michigan legislative documents, 1889–90 (full view)books.google.com

The full-view volume Quote Investigator links for Wright’s 25 June 1889 address, which it cites at page 311. Google Books titles the volume “Documents Accompanying the Journal of the House” (Michigan. Legislature); we confirmed it resolves and is full view, but could not search inside it.
Carroll D. Wrighten.wikipedia.org

The statistician’s life (1840–1909): first U.S. Commissioner of Labor 1885–1905, head of the Eleventh Census, president of Clark College.
Mark Twainen.wikipedia.org

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 30 November 1835 – 21 April 1910 — the death date that makes the 1913 ascription posthumous.
Wikiquote: Mark Twainen.wikiquote.org

Twain’s sourced quotations — this proverb is not among them, though his real remark on statistics and Disraeli is.

The man it is credited to

About Carroll D. Wright

Carroll D. Wright

1840–1909 · American statistician & first U.S. Commissioner of Labor

Carroll Davidson Wright was an American statistician and the first U.S. Commissioner of Labor, serving from 1885 to 1905. He enlisted as a private in 1862, left the Civil War a colonel, sat in the Massachusetts Senate, and ran the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor before taking charge of the Eleventh Census in 1893. He chaired the commission investigating the 1894 Pullman Strike and later became president of Clark College. His professional creed was that honest statistics are a defence against dishonest argument — which is exactly why this proverb stuck to him.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

“The Fire Laddies: The Great Public Benefit.” Grand Forks Daily Herald, 29 February 1884, 1. Earliest documented printing, unattributed. For Wright’s 1889 use: Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, in Joint Documents of the State of Michigan for the Year 1889, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Lansing: Darius D. Thorp, 1890), 311.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Figures Don’t Lie, But Liars Do Figure’?” Last verified 10 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/figures-dont-lie-but-liars-do-figure/

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