
“Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.”
Actually said by Andrew Lang, in a 1910 speech: "Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination", as quoted in Alan L. Mackay, The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977), and reported in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 488.
Misattributed