Charles Murray

“The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.”

“Trumpism' is the expression by the white working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class.”

“People need self-respect, that 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.”

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

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

“I love Europe, but I don't want America to become like Europe.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“You can learn a lot about good management by working under someone who is a bad manager.”

“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 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.”

“If you don't start your career until 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.”

“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.”