I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician - that's hard.
Charles Murray
The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.
IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable certain things that inferior chip speed will not enable. The same is true about just about any human attribute you can think of that has no relationship to IQ whatsoever.
To equate IQ with human virtue or wisdom or character or a whole variety of other of the most important measures of a value of a person is ridiculous.
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?
I don't lose any sleep over people calling me names.
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.
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.
The government is a terrible employer, and that goes for national service jobs as well.
Don't argue that you can't find a job that pays enough to support yourself. You can. You just can't find a job that will support you in the style to which you have been accustomed.
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.
Here's the secret you should remember whenever you hear someone lamenting how tough it is to get ahead in the postindustrial global economy: Few people work nearly as hard as they could.
Ecumenical niceness is just pabulum.
Certainly, I find that 'Mere Christianity' speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me.
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.
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.
There's a big difference in outcomes between children who grow up without a father and children who grow up with a married set of parents.
I had friends, but I was always a bit weird.
Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity.
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.
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.
To talk about the superiority of an ethnic group on the basis of some points of difference on IQ tests is idiotic.
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.
IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.
Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families.
We are under a moral obligation to do our best to realize the best that human beings can be. To neglect that obligation is to waste our lives.
You can learn a lot about good management by working under someone who is a bad manager.
Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground.
As for tattoos, it does no good to remind curmudgeons that tattoos have been around for millennia. Yes, we will agree, tattoos have been common - first among savage tribes and then, more recently, among the lowest classes of Western societies.
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.
It takes a lot of courage, self-confidence, and stubbornness to be an openly committed Christian - or openly committed to any of the great religious traditions - as an undergraduate in selective colleges or in the honors programs of large universities.
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.
The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.
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.
Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.
In 1960, it was still - no nostalgia here - an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods.
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.
There's a big difference between being good and being nice. Being good involves tough choices - tough love.
I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters.
People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets.
I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty.
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.
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 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 love Europe, but I don't want America to become like Europe.
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.
I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves.
I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.
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.
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.
