Statistics are your hard facts that will usually make your point across well in a speech. The key thing to remember is that you need to make sure where you get your statistics is from a reliable source such as from the U.S. government Census Bureau or a well-renowned non-profit organization such as the Rand Institute.
Finding statistics may seem to be finding a needle in a haystack if you search Google or even EBSCOhost. Fortunately, on the right here are portals to many numbers and statistics you can find for your research (see databases to your right).