Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary, 1/21/17:
“Let’s go through the facts. We know that from the platform where the President was sworn in to Fourth Street holds about 250,000 people. From Fourth Street to the media tent is about another 220,000. From the media tent to the Washington Monument another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the oath of office. We know that 420,000 people used the DC Metro public transit yesterday, which is actually comparable to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration. Period. Both in person and around the globe.”
From 1984, by George Orwell:
“It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.”
B.H. James 