Charles Murray Quotes

A variant of the NIT puts it within our power to end poverty, provide for comfortable retirement and medical care for everyone, and - as a bonus that is probably more important than any of the immediate effects - revitalize American civil society. ~ Charles Murray

The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk. ~ Charles Murray

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn't what it used to be. ~ Charles Murray

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960. ~ Charles Murray

The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010. ~ Charles Murray

Many curmudgeons believe that a malady afflicts many of today's twenty-somethings: their sense of entitlement. It is their impression that too many of you think doing routine office tasks is beneath you, and your supervisors are insufficiently sensitive to your needs. Curmudgeons are also likely to think that you have a higher opinion of your abilities than your performance warrants. ~ Charles Murray

Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life - achieve happiness - the answer is that there are just four: family, vocation, community, and faith, with these provisos: Community can embrace people who are scattered geographically. Vocation can include avocations or causes. It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four domains, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life occurs within those four domains. ~ Charles Murray

The goal of an end to poverty is so noble that governments have successfully used the end to justify the means. The means have been high taxation of the productive members of society and arrays of bureaucracies that increasingly regulate the lives of us all. 1 ~ Charles Murray

paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience - much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens. ~ Charles Murray

Inequality of wealth grounded in unequal abilities is different. For most of us, the luck of the draw cuts several ways: one person is not handsome, but is smart; another is not as smart, but is industrious; and still another is not as industrious, but is charming. This kind of inequality of human capital is enriching, making life more interesting for everyone. But some portion of the population gets the short end of the stick on several dimensions. As the number of dimensions grows, so does the punishment for being unlucky. When a society tries to redistribute the goods of life to compensate the most unlucky, its heart is in the right place, however badly the thing has worked out in practice. ~ Charles Murray

family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family's socioeconomic status.14 I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties. In ~ Charles Murray

The argument starts by accepting that the American government will continue to spend a huge amount of money on income transfers. It then contends that we should take all of that money and give it back to the American people in cash grants. The ~ Charles Murray

I have been drawn to Milton Friedman's argument for a negative income tax (NIT) that entirely replaces the existing system of income transfers and social services. The quid pro quo would be that the government withdraw altogether from every other form of interference in the organization of social life. Under such a plan the Department of Health and Human Services would become a check-writing office, and the social service agencies, bureaus, and offices scattered throughout government would close down. ~ Charles Murray

Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored. ~ Thomas Sowell

They don't know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child. ~ Charles Murray

A common and depressing assumption on the part of many college students is that they must stay on the academic rails until they are professionally established - go directly to grad school from college and directly from grad school to a job, as if there were some big rush and even a few years lost would put them catastrophically behind everyone else. Nonsense. Suppose you intend to retire at sixty-five. If you don't start your career until you're thirty, that still gives you thirty-five years to make it professionally. If you can't make it in thirty-five years, you weren't going to make it in forty or forty-five. ~ Charles Murray

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers. ~ Charles Murray

As I come to the end of my advice and send you off into the world, I have an alternative way for you to stay on the straight and narrow: periodically watch Groundhog Day. It was made long ago, in 1993, but it's still smart and funny, the chemistry between the stars (Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell) is terrific, and it has a happy ending. Groundhog Day is also a profound moral fable that deals with the most fundamental issues of virtue and happiness. ~ Charles Murray

the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren't, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class. ~ Charles Murray

[The humanities] invite - they compel - us to confront the truth about ourselves and help us to inhabit with greater understanding the disjointed condition of longing and defeat that defines the human condition. Achilles' reflections on honor and memory and the fleeting beauty of youth; Shakespeare's defense of love against the powers of "sluttish time" Kant's struggle to put our knowledge of certain things on an unchallengeable foundation so as to place the knowledge of others forever beyond reach; Caravaggio's painting of the sacrifice of Isaac, which depicts a confusion of loves that defeats all understanding; and so on endlessly through the armory of humanistic works: the subject is always the same. The subject is always man, whose nature it is to yearn to be more than he is. ~ Charles Murray

The genius of free human beings is that, given responsibility, they join together to take care of each other - to be their brothers' keepers when their brother needs help. The triumph of an earlier America was that it had set all the right trends in motion, at a time when the world was first coming out of millennia of poverty into an era of plenty. The tragedy of contemporary America is that it abandoned that course. Libertarians want to return to it. ~ Charles Murray

Regardless of whether people have free will, human flourishing requires that they live in an environment in which they are treated as if they did. ~ Charles Murray

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing a theoretical outcome, but American neighborhoods where, once working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't. Taking the trouble out of life strips people in major ways which human beings look back on their lives and say, 'I made a difference. ~ Charles Murray

Some people pursue happiness in ways that tend to be accompanied by large incomes, others in ways that tend to be accompanied by lower incomes. In a free society, these choices are made voluntarily, with psychic rewards balanced against monetary rewards. Income inequality is accordingly large. So what? ~ Charles Murray

The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer - but there's a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don't have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as "things we don't have to argue about anymore" - but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them.

Here they are:

1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures.

2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability.

3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things.

4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior.

5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.

6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.

7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.

8. The share ~ Charles Murray

Considerable social science research has found that constant praise of children can backfire, because it so often consists of telling children how smart they are, not of praising children for the things they actually do. As a result, many children become protective of their image of being smart and are reluctant to take chances that might actually damage that image. ~ Charles Murray

Nice and good are different. Being nice involves immediate actions and immediate consequences - you give water to the thirsty and comfort to the afflicted right here, right now. Being good involves living in the world so that you contribute to the welfare of your fellow human beings. ~ Charles Murray

To notice a difference is to have an opinion about it - unless one refuses to think. And that is my ultimate objection to nonjudgmentalism. We can refuse to voice our judgments, but we cannot keep from having them unless we refuse to think about what is before our eyes. ~ Charles Murray

If I'm wrong, and you find yourself in an organization where sucking up is in fact a good way to get ahead, look for a new job. It's not a quality organization after all, no matter how glittering its public reputation may be. Life is too short to work there. ~ Charles Murray

The responsibilities of marriage induce young men to settle down, focus, and get to work. ~ Charles Murray

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people. Most students at today's colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don't want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn't make sense for them. ~ Charles Murray

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. ~ Charles Murray

THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation's most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus. Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of "Bowling Alone" (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, "Our Kids", he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Anyone who has read "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray will be familiar with the trend, but Mr Putnam adds striking detail and some excellent graphs (pictured). This is a thoughtful and ~ Anonymous

Four American traits were central to the evolution of that culture: industriousness, egalitarianism, religiosity, and an amalgam of philanthropy and volunteerism that was uniquely American. ~ Charles Murray

It used to be that parents didn't have to be home. If a neighbor so I child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.

Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy to their children. ~ Charles Murray

The third Great Awakening is variously said to have started between the 1860s and 1890; it continued into the early 1900s and laid the ethical basis for the emancipation of women, the reforms of the New Deal and, later, the civil rights movement. ~ Charles Murray

Changing the new upper class by force majeure won't work and isn't a good idea in any case. The new upper class will change only if its members decide that it is in the interest of themselves and of their families to change. And possibly also because they decide it is in the interest of the country they love. ~ Charles Murray

That's the UBI. A cash grant, with a surtax, funded by eliminating the transfers that currently exist. I require that $3,000 be devoted to health care, but otherwise I will argue that many of the best effects of the UBI are fostered by the least direction: "Here's the money. Use it as you see fit. Your life is in your hands. ~ Charles Murray

When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America's more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives. ~ Charles Murray

solutions are beyond the reach of the electoral process and legislative process. ~ Charles Murray

Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance. ~ Charles Murray

There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

Jan was an excellent fuck ... she had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killing her. ~ Charles Bukowski

Lord, save all the elect, and then elect some more. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Judge not man by his outward manifestation of faith; for some there are who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of faith; others who stoutly venture in the dark their human confidence, their leader, which they mistake for faith; some whose hope totters upon crutches; others who stalk into futurity upon stilts. The difference is chiefly constitutional with them. ~ Charles Lamb

When you go into your customary barber shop, you will wait for the man who gives you a little better shave, a little trimmer hair-cut. Business leaders are looking for the same things in their offices that you look for in the barber shop. ~ Charles M. Schwab

We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
THerei s nothing else that so kills the ambitions ofa person as criticism from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my appreciation and lavish in my praise ~ Charles Schwab

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.

Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater ~ Charles A. Lindbergh

Strength comes from choosing to fully trust, pray, and praise. Our circumstances may not change, but in the process we change. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

In order for your dreams to come true, you've got to stay awake. ~ Charles Durning

I feel certain that his tale is true. Feeling that certainty, I befriend him. As long as that certainty shall last, I will befriend him. And if any consideration could shake me in this resolve, I should be so ashamed of myself for my meanness, that no man's good opinion - no, nor no woman's - so gained, could compensate me for the loss of my own. ~ Charles Dickens

When you are at one with the world, you often find that the thing you seek is seeking you. ~ Charles F. Haanel

The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it. ~ Charles Handy

Make sure everyone who works with you or for you, feels the need to tell others about the incredible experience. ~ Chris Murray

He is truly great in power who hath power over himself. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Sit down," she ordered Peabody.

"I prefer to stand."

"And I prefer to give you a good boot in the ass, but I'm restraining myself." Eve reached up, fisted her hands in her own hair and yanked until the pain cleared most of the rage.

"Okay, stand. You couldn't sit with that stick up your butt, anyway. One you shove up it every time Subject Monroe, Charles, is mentioned. You want to be filled in, you want to be briefed? Fine. Here it is."

She had to take another deep breath to insure her tone was professional. "On the evening of March twenty-six, at or about nineteen-thirty, I, accompanied by Roarke, had occasion to visit Areena Mansfield's penthouse suite at The Palace Hotel, this city. Upon entering said premises, investigation officer found subject Mansfield in the company of one Charles Monroe, licensed companion. It was ascertained and confirmed that LC Monroe was there in a professional capacity and had no links to the deceased or the current investigation. His presence, and the salient details pertaining to it, were noted in the report of the interview and marked Level Five in a stupid, ill-conceived attempt by the investigating officer to spare her fat-headed aide any unnecessary embarrassment."

Eve stomped back to her desk, snatched up her coffee, gulped some down. "Record that," she snapped.

Peabody's lip trembled. She sat. She sniffled.

"Oh, no." In genuine panic, Eve stabbed out a finger. " ~ J.D. Robb

What God has divided, let us never try to unite, but as Christ went without the camp, bearing His reproach, so let us come out from the ungodly, and be a peculiar people. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word. ~ Gilbert Murray

There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people ... Religion, Politics, and The Great Pumpkin. ~ Charles M. Schulz

Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Lewis Carroll. He was an odd one. Real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Completely denied having anything to do with the Alice books. Daft as a brush. You'd have liked him! ~ Mike Tucker

Men constantly miscalculate what they can do in a day, and grossly underestimate what can be achieved in a year. ~ Chris Murray

Listen to your conscience. It has the power to burn you alive, without killing you. ~ Charles Samuel D'Monte

Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it. ~ Charles Dudley Warner

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice. ~ Charles Lamb

Alboreto has dropped back up to fifth place. ~ Murray Walker

And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry.
And ~ Charles Taylor

Here's the thing, you just have to drive a lot faster, and if you don't get there, we're both fired. ~ Bill Murray

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation. ~ Charles Darwin

I'm hungry," she said. "Let me cook!" "I'm hungry too. I'll eat you! ~ Charles Bukowski

The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts. ~ Martin Rees

And the first five places are filled by five different cars. ~ Murray Walker

He put his shoes over the red stone footprints and when he came to the last one on the path, fell to the ground and imagined being shot. The grass was cool and sharp on his cheek. Dying, he resolved, was like that - like lying down on a piece of very green grass, surrounded by flowering shrubs, and never getting up again. ~ John Murray

Purpose, and to be thoroughly wedded to that purpose, is three quarters of salvation. ~ Charles Henry Parkhurst

God is full of love, for "God is love." God is full of goodness; the very name "God" is short for "good. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There is significant evidence, however, that Bonin was in the grip of what's known as "cognitive tunneling" - a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention. ~ Charles Duhigg

One good deed is more worth than a thousand brilliant theories. Let us not wait for large opportunities, or for a different kind of work, but do just the things we "find to do" day by day. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Satan will make many a fierce attack on your perseverance; it will be the mark for all his arrows. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much. ~ Charles Dickens

My soul, get Calvary's blood-red rose into thy hand by faith, by love wear it, by communion preserve it, by daily watchfulness make it thine all in all, and thou shalt be blessed beyond all bliss, happy beyond a dream. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Let us see God before man every day. ~ Robert Murray M'Cheyne

It would be well, there can be no doubt, for the American people as a whole, if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more. It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful. ~ Charles Dickens

The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that today is like yesterday, but he believes tomorrow will be different. ~ Charles Dudley Warner