Dubious
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The original quote is: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic ...However the origin of the quote is referring to French war rather than Jews...The death of a single jew is tragedy , the death of millions are static
-Joseph stalin , refering to hitler's death camps
- The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
- "Mustering Most Memorable Quips" by Julia Solovyova, in The Moscow Times (28 October 1997) states: Russian historians have no record of the lines, "Death of one man is a tragedy. Death of a million is a statistic," commonly attributed by English-language dictionaries to Josef Stalin. Discussing the book by Konstantin Dushenko (Константин Душенко) Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Словарь современных цитат: 4300 ходячих цитат и выражений ХХ века, их источники, авторы, датировка).
- Variants: One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic
When one dies, it is a tragedy. When a million die, it is a statistic. - This quotation probably was originated from «Französischer Witz» by Kurt Tucholsky (1932): «Darauf sagt ein Diplomat vom Quai d’Orsay: «Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!»» («At which a diplomat from France replies: «The war? I can't find it too terrible! The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!»»)
- But Note: "When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics." This is the exact quote from the McCullough biography of Truman, books.google.de According to the citation in that book, McCullough got it from page 278 of the book "The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny", by Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. McCullough quotes Stalin as having said this to Churchill at Teheran. "Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Stalin responded that 'when one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics'".