What Twain said was "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" which he attributed to Disraeli but Disraeli never said it and there is some controversy over who actually did; which is sort of funny considering the subject of the quote is lies. Statistics, broadly speaking, has two definitions, data and the methods of interpreting data. Of course data can be flat out wrong or fabricated (and there is always measurement error) but more often the lies (or misunderstanding) is the result of problems with the interpretation.

For myself, I deal with the interpretation of data all the time professionally (I am a Professor and, among other things, have a Ph.D. in statistics) but although I now collect huge amounts of data every time I ride owing to having a Garmin 705, I hardly ever actually look at the data or analyze it because I just don't find it that interesting. I suppose if I ever get serious about training for something I might do so but mostly I think my body is pretty good about telling my brain what it needs to know without getting technology involved. I got the Garmin for touring in Europe and on the mainland (for which it has proved very useful) but I would have never spent the money just to collect data. I do have to admit I wrote a program in "R" to read the tcx file and, as a result, I can do some very sophisticated analysis with the data but aside from proving I could write the software I never actually do any analysis ... I guess I would rather be riding or working on the bicycle than messing around with data.