Top 44 Charles Murray Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’m not like Ann Coulter.

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

Hey, I’m a libertarian. I think out of control spending messes up everything.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty.

I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.

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

Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There is one group that is more consistently portrayed as ineffectual, as unvirtuous, as incompetent, as objects of fun, and that is white working class guys.

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.

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.

Ecumenical niceness is just pabulum.

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.