Quotes from 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

Try hard. Be true. Enjoy. Godspeed.

My voice isn't authentically me without Catherine's help.

Page 46: Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all.

Page 39: Among people of the four races with IQs of 100, 70 percent are European or Asian. For IQs of 115, 85 percent. For IQs of 125, 90 percent. For IQs of 140, 96 percent.

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

Page 67: For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn't worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.

The entry of government into social insurance and then into a broader range of social interventions has caused incalculable human suffering. It has not produced a society in which fewer people are dependent than would otherwise have been the case. The welfare state has artificially, needlessly created a large dependent class. At the bottom is the underclass, stripped of dignity and autonomy, producing new generations socialized to their parents' behavior. There

Page 321: But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.

For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

The relationship of marriage to happiness is simple as can be. There's hardly anything better than a good marriage for promoting happiness and nothing worse than a bad one.

The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.3

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work. —FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK, The Road to Serfdom

Corruption in the political process varies directly with the number and value of things that politicians have to sell. This

Why is it a good thing to understand this movie so well? Because it will help you live a good life. Absorbing the deep meaning of the Nicomachean Ethics will also help you live a good life, but Groundhog Day will do it with a lot less effort. 35.

Page 85: Results for the military stand apart from all civilian work settings and occupations. One relevant factor for explaining the military's success is presumably that each branch has its own minimum score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test required of all recruits. The Army requires a score at the 31st percentile or higher, equivalent to an IQ of 92.6 or more, which is roughly the top half of the African and Latin distributions.

solutions are beyond the reach of the electoral process and legislative process.

natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."6

Joan played den mother to the rebirth of American individualism. That she filled that role for so many is why I am grateful that this biography is appearing. In ways that a biography of QUOTE FOR PERSUADED BY REASON: one of the more famous figures could not do, Jeff Riggenbach's account of Joan Kennedy Taylor's journey captures the spirit of the individualist movement she so vividly embodied

People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned -- it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned -- and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.

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.

Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards.

Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when the exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.

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