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The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician.

Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments.

I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.

Republicans and Democrats have used accounting gimmicks and competing government analyses to deceive the public into believing that 2 + 2 = 6. If our leaders cannot agree on the numbers, if 'facts' are fictional, how can they possibly have a substantive debate on solutions?

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Sometimes Republicans engage in number-crunching analysis that doesn't always take the neediest into account.