There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics
Not Mark Twain — he printed it, but credited someone elseUnknownIn print by 1891 · no single originator; Twain credited Disraeli, who had died in 1881
?Attribution status: Twain’s printing of the line is documented and verifiable. What is false is the credit: he was quoting, not coining, and the saying’s true author is unknown.✓Reuse status: Free to reuse
Mark Twain really did publish this exact sentence — in “Chapters from My Autobiography—XX,” The North American Review, No. DCXVIII, 5 July 1907 — but he set it in quotation marks and introduced it as “the remark attributed to Disraeli.” Disraeli died in 1881, the phrase is absent from his works, and versions of the saying were already in British newspapers by 1891; Quote Investigator concludes the quotation cannot be credited to a single creator.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” not Mark Twain's line. Twain did print it, in "Chapters from My Autobiography—XX," The North American Review, No. DCXVIII, 5 July 1907, but introduced it as "the remark attributed to Disraeli." Disraeli died in 1881 and the phrase is not found in his works; the earliest known version using "statistics" is a letter in The National Observer (London), 13 June 1891. Quote Investigator concludes the saying evolved over decades and cannot be credited to a single creator. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mark Twain. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
✓ Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of truth and doubt. Theme: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". 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.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". 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
Where the wording actually appears
Work
Chapters from My Autobiography—XX
Published
The North American Review, No. DCXVIII, 5 July 1907
Dictated
Section headed “Notes on ‘Innocents Abroad.’ Dictated in Florence, Italy, April, 1904”
Twain’s framing
Quoted, not claimed — “the remark attributed to Disraeli”
I was deducing from the above that I have been slowing down steadily in these thirty-six years, but I perceive that my statistics have a defect: three thousand words in the spring of 1868 when I was working seven or eight or nine hours at a sitting has little or no advantage over the sitting of to-day, covering half the time and producing half the output. Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force:
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
“Chapters from My Autobiography—XX,” 5 July 1907
The load-bearing words are Twain’s five before the quotation marks: the remark attributed to Disraeli. He is passing the line along, not minting it — and he is using it against his own arithmetic about how many words a day he wrote.
📄
Full text of the 1907 North American Review instalments
13 June 1891 — the first instance known to Quote Investigator that uses the word “statistics”: a letter from T. Mackay in The National Observer of London, describing “three kinds of falsehood: the first is a ‘fib,’ the second is a downright lie, and the third and most aggravated is statistics.” The attribution is anonymous (Quote Investigator ↗).
29 June 1892 — The Leeds Mercury reports Arthur Balfour’s speech of the previous night in Manchester, in which he said “there were three kinds of unveracity–namely, lies, damned lies, and statistics” (Quote Investigator ↗).
1895 — Leonard H. Courtney, in his essay “To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs” in The National Review, quotes “the words of the Wise Statesman, ‘Lies — damned lies — and statistics’” without naming the statesman (Wikiquote ↗).
5 July 1907 — Mark Twain prints the modern wording in The North American Review, No. DCXVIII, and credits Disraeli. The full text of that instalment is on Project Gutenberg ↗.
✓Public domain
The passage quoted here was first published in The North American Review, No. DCXVIII, on 5 July 1907 — well before 1931 — so it is in the public domain in the United States, and Project Gutenberg carries the complete text of the instalments. The earlier newspaper and periodical instances in the trail (1882–1895) are older still.
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.
Know a source that supports or challenges this? Add a link →
Fact-check
Who it gets pinned on — and why each pin fails
This is one of the internet’s most reliably mislabelled “Mark Twain” quotes, and the irony is that Twain himself is the reason we can prove he didn’t write it: he printed it inside quotation marks and named someone else.
✕
The whole sentenceMark Twain the popular credit
He published the exact wording, but as a quotation: “the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force.” Wikiquote lists the line in the Misattributed section of its Mark Twain page, adding that he “did, however, popularize this saying in the United States” (Wikiquote ↗).
✕
The whole sentenceBenjamin Disraeli Twain’s own guess
Disraeli died in 1881. Wikipedia notes the phrase “is not found in any of Disraeli’s works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death” (Wikipedia ↗), and Quote Investigator dates the first attributions to him to 1895 — a July letter from W. P. Treloar in The Standard and The Times, and an August item in The Sun of New York (Quote Investigator ↗). Wikiquote files it under Misattributed on his page too.
✕
Close 1891–92 variantsCharles Dilke, Charles Stewart Parnell, Arthur Balfour users, not coiners
All three had versions credited to them in 1891–92, and Balfour’s 1892 Manchester wording is very close to the modern one. But Quote Investigator’s conclusion is explicit: Dilke and Balfour “used instances, but only after closely matching statements were in circulation” (Quote Investigator ↗).
✕
The 1895 “Wise Statesman” versionLeonard H. Courtney quoting an unnamed source
Courtney — later president of the Royal Statistical Society — used the phrase in 1895 but attributed it to an unidentified “Wise Statesman”; Wikipedia notes it is unclear whom, if anyone, he meant (Wikipedia ↗). His essay is one of several near-contemporary uses, not the first.
✓The honest answer is that nobody owns it. Quote Investigator, after laying out citations from 1882 to 1907, finds the line is one member of “a large and evolving collection of sayings with incremental changes occurring over decades” and that it “cannot be credited to single creator” (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
How a courtroom joke became a statistics joke
Before it was about statistics, it was about expert witnesses. Quote Investigator’s chronology opens in April 1882 with The Times of London reporting a judge’s quip that “liars might be divided into three classes—liars, great liars, and scientific witnesses,” and traces a decade of variants swapping in “the expert,” “the damnable liar” and “expert witness.” The word statistics only enters the joke on 13 June 1891, in a letter from T. Mackay printed in The National Observer: “three kinds of falsehood: the first is a ‘fib,’ the second is a downright lie, and the third and most aggravated is statistics” (Quote Investigator ↗).
Within eighteen months the saying was loose in British public life, and everyone was crediting someone else. Arthur Balfour used a close match in a Manchester speech on 28 June 1892; the following day The Leeds Mercury reported him saying “there were three kinds of unveracity–namely, lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Quote Investigator’s verdict on the claimants is blunt: Dilke and Balfour used instances “only after closely matching statements were in circulation,” and the quotation as a whole “cannot be credited to single creator” (Quote Investigator ↗).
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself.
Why Twain’s name stuck anyway
Twain was being credited with a version of the joke long before he printed one. Quote Investigator records a letter in The British Medical Journal of 7 November 1891 reporting that “Mark Twain classifies falsehood under three heads: 1, the fib; 2, the lie; 3, statistics” — years before the 1907 instalment in which he actually used it, and credited Disraeli (Quote Investigator ↗).
Twain’s 1907 version is the one the modern world quotes, and Wikiquote notes that he “did, however, popularize this saying in the United States” even as it files the line under Misattributed on his page (Wikiquote ↗). A famous byline is a better carrier than an anonymous newspaper letter, which is exactly how the credit drifted.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1835–1910 · American humorist, novelist and lecturer (Samuel L. Clemens)
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the American humorist behind The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the autobiographical instalments he serialised in The North American Review in 1906–07 he used the statistics gibe against his own arithmetic — and expressly handed the credit to Benjamin Disraeli. Wikiquote files the line in its Misattributed section on his page, noting that Twain popularised the saying in the United States rather than originating it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Mark Twain, “Chapters from My Autobiography—XX,” The North American Review, No. DCXVIII (5 July 1907); the line appears in a section headed “Notes on ‘Innocents Abroad.’ Dictated in Florence, Italy, April, 1904,” where Twain presents it as “the remark attributed to Disraeli.” Earliest instance employing the word “statistics” known to Quote Investigator: letter from T. Mackay, The National Observer (London), 13 June 1891.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-are-three-kinds-of-lies-lies-damned-lies-and/