Quotes from Charles Murray

No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Price of Admission, journalist Daniel Golden documents the ways in which elite schools manage to find room for the children of alums, big donors, celebrities, athletes, the elite college's own faculty, and wealthy parents whose estates might eventually make their heirs into big donors.20

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.

I could answer by telling you that such selective sweeps create a valley of genetic diversity around the site under selection, that they leave a deficit of extreme allele frequencies (low or high) at linked sites and an increase in linkage disequilibrium in flanking regions—but that doesn't tell you much unless you're a geneticist.