Top 86 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Murray

I want to keep the government out of the business of giving incentives to have or not have kids, or incentives to marry or not marry.

You know, there is an image of me out there for which advocacy of a universal basic income is inconsistent. It doesn't fit the narrative because this is supposed to be the hardhearted, racist, sexist, homophobe, Charles Murray. And he wants to increase spending on the poor? That doesn't fit.

Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity.

I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves.

The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.

Certainly, I find that 'Mere Christianity' speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me.

I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.

Hardly anybody realizes that the first couple of chapters of 'Coming Apart' were basically a recapitulation of the argument in 'The Bell Curve.' That's how little people focused on 'The Bell Curve's' real message.

The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.

People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. - there is no government money - because they think the work we do is valuable.

If we want to jack up the tax rates on the really rich, the amounts of money that would bring in are trivial compared to jacking up rates on the middle class.

I don't think there is a libertarian position on abortion. Maybe if you took a poll of libertarians, it might be that a majority would be pro-choice, but, the libertarian position is to protect the rights of individuals against the use of force and fraud.

When I'm talking about the white working class, here's what I'm defining: high school degree, no more, and working in a blue-collar job or a low-skilled service job. When I'm talking about the white, upper-middle class, I'm talking about people who work in the professions or managerial jobs and have at least a college degree.

I would like to have seen millions of votes left blank for president to send a message there are millions of voters out there who do not like ideologue or Donald Trump.

Probably the smartest president we've had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.

The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.

The new upper class devotes incredible amounts of effort to raising their kids but that also includes incredible amounts of effort in getting their kids into the right preschool in some elite communities which I think is going a little bit too far.

Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because my feeling is, if you can't answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying to understand the country you live in.

My family was pretty much the way a family was supposed to be, a Norman Rockwell kind of family, I'm afraid. I say 'I'm afraid' because it will just confirm my critics' view that my views about family are unrealistic.

By the end of writing 'Losing Ground,' I realized I was a libertarian.

A guaranteed basic income has the potential for making civic organizations, families and neighborhoods much more vital, helpful and responsive than they have been in decades.

To voice one's curmudgeonly thoughts - 'I hate tattoos,' 'If that kid says 'like' even one more time, I'm going to fire him,' and such things, instantly labels one as a geezer.

I want to give people a basic income, so that if you're working hard, doing the best you can, that you can not just survive, but you can have a decent life.

The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic.

I think that, in the '60s, you had lots of things going on in the culture which tended to decrease attraction to marriage, attraction to religion, and which tended to increase attraction to crime.

Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground.

America's always been very good at providing help to people in need. It hasn't been perfect, but they've been very good at it.

I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.

I love Europe, but I don't want America to become like Europe.

I had friends, but I was always a bit weird.

I want the new upper class to start preaching what it practices. They are getting married and staying married in large numbers. They work like crazy, long hours. They even do better going to church than lots of the rest of America. Why not just say, these are not just choices we have made for ourselves. These are rich, rewarding ways of living.

I think that a great deal of what made America special is lost beyond recall, and I don't have any good policy ideas that I am at all confident will go very far in bringing that back.

Well, do I think watching 35 hours of TV a week is a terrific thing to do? Not particularly. But do I think you're shutting yourself off from a lot of American culture if you are so completely isolated from what goes on, on popular TV? Yeah, you are!

There's a big difference between being good and being nice. Being good involves tough choices - tough love.

The people who run the country have enormous influence over the culture, politics, and the economics of the country. And increasingly, they haven't a clue about how most of America lives. They have never experienced it.

I think we ought to strip our laws and regulations of everything that rewards or recommends or requires preferential treatment by race. I think that is one of the single most unfortunate changes of the 1960s and it is one that we can change at no cost.

When America installs a minimum income, it's going to be doing it in a very different historical context than Switzerland or Sweden or Germany, or any other country might do it. And we're doing it in a context where it has the potential, I think, for much better consequences than in those other countries.

My whole career has been one wrong answer after another as far as the left is concerned.

White supremacist? Let's see: if you have a guy who was married for 13 years to an Asian woman and who has two lovely Asian daughters, wouldn't that disqualify him from membership in the white supremacist club?

A part of me always felt like an outsider and still does.

My professional background consisted of evaluating specific programs the government was sponsoring in education or social services or, when I was in Thailand, rural development.

Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.

We decided in the mid-1960s that all poor people are the same: they are all poor. We know they're poor because we have defined a poverty line, and they're all underneath it.

The '60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

Illegitimacy is important for the socialisation of little girls and especially little boys. If you have large numbers of young men growing up who never see an adult male doing the ordinary things men do, then you get chaos. This is not a moral statement, it's an empirical statement.

Ecumenical niceness is just pabulum.

Whatever the Victorians did right in England, we need to resuscitate over here. In the late 19th century, the entire English population were propagandised into buying into a certain code of morals. I would be happy if we could emulate that in some way in America.

In 1960, it was still - no nostalgia here - an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods.

I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and - as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump - I can sympathize with that.

IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.

I don't lose any sleep over people calling me names.

We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.

I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters.

It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.

I'm not like Ann Coulter.

I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician - that's hard.

This is what old guys do. They get dark and pessimistic.

It's much more fun to talk to an audience that includes a lot of people who disagree with me.

More humility, in terms of recognizing our luck, and more realism, in understanding at a deep level that being smart doesn't make you good, doesn't make you valuable, doesn't make you wise.

When 'The Bell Curve' came out, I'd have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak.