On the first day of my statistics class we were told that “statistics is the art of how to make figures lie and how to lie with figures and that the graph was the biggest aid to the perfect lie and that anyone that used the word statistics in this class would receive an F”.
I learned statistics in grad school from the classic text of Reif : Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics. It’s the way the world works. You’re living it every second.
How to Lie with Statistics, Darryl Huff, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, NY, 1954.
Available as paperback, my copy is 53th printing. The quote comes from Disraeli.