Joseph Stalin? Leonard Lyons?
Dear Quote Investigator: When studying the history of the Soviet Union in school I came across one quote that I remember vividly. The words were supposedly said by the dictator Joseph Stalin, and provide a haunting insight into the mind of a tyrant:
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
But now I wonder if this quote is too conveniently revealing. Maybe it was invented. Did Stalin really say it?
Quote Investigator: This is a controversial and fascinating quotation. Until recently the earliest citation for the quote was in a 1958 book review in the New York Times where it was labeled “Stalin’s epigram”. The Quote Verifier and the Yale Book of Quotations list the 1958 cite [FRN][QVS][YBS][FRS].
Now, two earlier citations have emerged in 1948 and 1947.