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“Stories are no substitute for judgment,” Henry Clay famously said. “I can prove anything by example except the truth,” the British statesman George Canning said. “Facts are stubborn things, but anecdotes are more pliable,” Mark Twain wrote. Perhaps most famous of all is a line of unknown provenance: “Lies, damn lies and anecdotes.”

By now, you’ve probably caught on to my deception. None of those above quotations are accurate. In place of “stories,” “example,” and “anecdotes,” each of the speakers was credited with actually saying “statistics.” The point of each quotation, in its true form, was that numbers can deceive.

And so they can. As can every other kind of information: anecdotes, examples, stories, quotations, illustrations and even photography and video. No single form of communication is inherently accurate.