The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

This quotation probably originated in France after World War I. The March 6, 1924 edition of the French satirical newspaper Comic-Finance published what may be the earliest version of the quote as part of a likely-fictional anecdote in which a diplomat from the Quai d'Orsay (a metonym for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) quips about the tragedies of war: "War? It's not that terrible! The death of one man is, indeed, a terrible thing, but one hundred thousand deaths is a statistic" ("La guerre? Ce n'est pas si terrible! La mort d'un homme est, en effet, chose épouvantable; mais cent mille morts, c'est une statistique."). This quote was reused (without attribution) in newspaper columns by J.-Wladimir Bienstock and Curnonsky in April 1924 and (in German) by Kurt Tucholsky in 1925 and later reprinted in anthologies of their writing.

This quote was probably attributed to Stalin for the first time on January 30, 1947 in an article by the columnist Leonard Lyons in the Washington Post. Lyons wrote that Stalin, referring to the dead of the Holodomor, said in 1933: If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics. Lyons did not provide evidence for this quote. | In Портрет тирана (1981) (Portrait of a Tyrant), English translation The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny, Harper & Row, 1981, ISBN 0-06-010148-2; page 287 of the 1983 reprint Soviet historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko attributes the following version to Stalin: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." This is the alleged response of Stalin during the 1943 Tehran conference when Churchill objected to an early opening of a second front in France. | In her review "Mustering Most Memorable Quips" of Konstantin Dushenko's 1997 Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Словарь современных цитат: 4300 ходячих цитат и выражений ХХ века, их источники, авторы, датировка), Julia Solovyova 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." Mustering Most Memorable Quips, The Moscow Times, 1997-10-28 | Mary Soames (daughter of Winston Churchill) claims to have overheard Stalin deliver a variant of the quote in immediate while meeting with her father during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Winston Churchill was upset over news he'd received over the death of a family friend, and said to Stalin, "Oh, you must forgive me because when I think of the terrible losses your armies are suffering, and here am I upset by this news." Stalin is said to have replied, "Oh no, the death of one man is always a tragedy. The death of thousands is a matter of statistics." | In an interview given for the 1983 three-part documentary Der Prozeß by Norddeutscher Rund

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.