Charles Murray Quotes

#1. 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.

Charles Murray

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life... the responsibility of working there was too great... to be entrusted to people who weren't painfully aware of how badly things can go wrong.

Charles Murray

#6. 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

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

Charles Murray

#8. A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn't know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you?

Charles Murray

#9. 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

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

Charles Murray

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow citizens." That is Adam Smith talking, the apostle of laissez-faire.

Charles Murray

#15. The twin propositions of this book are that we are at the end of the American project as the founders intended it, but that opportunities are opening for preserving the best qualities of the American project in a new incarnation.

Charles Murray

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. it is said that roosters think the sun rises because they crow. Politicians are much the same.

Charles Murray

#20. All the other virtues, and the living of a virtuous life, depend on them. If you took an introductory philosophy course in college, they were probably translated from the Greek as courage, justice, temperance, and prudence.

Charles Murray

#21. 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

#22. They don't know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.

Charles Murray

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

Charles Murray

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

Charles Murray

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

Charles Murray

#26. A free society is most threatened not by uses of government that are obviously bad, but by uses of government that seem obviously good.

Charles Murray

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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.

Charles Murray