Welcome to our collection of insightful quotes by Charles Murray, a prominent American political scientist, author, and libertarian. Throughout his career, Murray has been a controversial figure, known for his writings on social policy, education, and the relationship between intelligence and socio-economic status. His work often challenges conventional wisdom and sparks intense debate, making him a significant voice in contemporary discourse on various societal issues.
Charles Murray gained widespread attention with his co-authored book The Bell Curve, which examined the role of intelligence in shaping America’s social structure. This work, along with others such as Losing Ground and Coming Apart, has cemented Murray’s reputation as a provocative thinker unafraid to tackle complex and contentious topics. Whether you agree or disagree with his viewpoints, Murray’s ideas continue to influence discussions on topics ranging from welfare reform to the nature of human intelligence. Explore the thought-provoking quotes below to gain insight into his perspective and contribute to the ongoing dialogue on these crucial issues.
To equate IQ with human virtue or wisdom or character or a whole variety of other of the most important measures of a value of a person is ridiculous. Charles Murray
But in all cases when you have problems in your interactions with your boss, there’s one more question you have to ask yourself: To what extent is your boss at fault, and to what extent are you a neophyte about supervisor-subordinate relationships? Charles Murray
I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and – as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump – I can sympathize with that. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
To talk about the superiority of an ethnic group on the basis of some points of difference on IQ tests is idiotic. Charles Murray
The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Charles Murray
A guaranteed basic income has the potential for making civic organizations, families and neighborhoods much more vital, helpful and responsive than they have been in decades. Charles Murray
Here’s the secret you should remember whenever you hear someone lamenting how tough it is to get ahead in the postindustrial global economy: Few people work nearly as hard as they could. Charles Murray
No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions. Charles Murray
I don’t think there is a libertarian position on abortion. Maybe if you took a poll of libertarians, it might be that a majority would be pro-choice, but, the libertarian position is to protect the rights of individuals against the use of force and fraud. Charles Murray
It’s much more fun to talk to an audience that includes a lot of people who disagree with me. Charles Murray
Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. Charles Murray
Hey, I’m a libertarian. I think out of control spending messes up everything. 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. Charles Murray
The religiosity of Americans I don’t think has ever been determined by how much money they make. Charles Murray
The people who run the country have enormous influence over the culture, politics, and the economics of the country. And increasingly, they haven’t a clue about how most of America lives. They have never experienced it. Charles Murray
Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. Charles Murray
Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because my feeling is, if you can’t answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying to understand the country you live in. Charles Murray
More humility, in terms of recognizing our luck, and more realism, in understanding at a deep level that being smart doesn’t make you good, doesn’t make you valuable, doesn’t make you wise. Charles Murray
Well, do I think watching 35 hours of TV a week is a terrific thing to do? Not particularly. But do I think you’re shutting yourself off from a lot of American culture if you are so completely isolated from what goes on, on popular TV? Yeah, you are! Charles Murray
For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world – for whites, anyway. Charles Murray
IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success. Charles Murray
There is one group that is more consistently portrayed as ineffectual, as unvirtuous, as incompetent, as objects of fun, and that is white working class guys. Charles Murray
The government is a terrible employer, and that goes for national service jobs as well. Charles Murray
There’s a big difference between being good and being nice. Being good involves tough choices – tough love. Charles Murray
I had friends, but I was always a bit weird. Charles Murray
Ecumenical niceness is just pabulum. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
It’s great if someone has a road-to-Damascus experience, but I think that deep and lasting faith is a lifetime project, and includes a lot of homework. Charles Murray
To voice one’s curmudgeonly thoughts – ‘I hate tattoos,’ ‘If that kid says ‘like’ even one more time, I’m going to fire him,’ and such things, instantly labels one as a geezer. Charles Murray
I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician – that’s hard. Charles Murray
I hate reading reviews. Charles Murray
I would like to have seen millions of votes left blank for president to send a message there are millions of voters out there who do not like ideologue or Donald Trump. Charles Murray
This is what old guys do. They get dark and pessimistic. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
I love Europe, but I don’t want America to become like Europe. Charles Murray
IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable certain things that inferior chip speed will not enable. The same is true about just about any human attribute you can think of that has no relationship to IQ whatsoever. Charles Murray
My professional background consisted of evaluating specific programs the government was sponsoring in education or social services or, when I was in Thailand, rural development. Charles Murray
The feminist revolution has tied writers into knots when it comes to the third-person singular pronoun. Using the masculine pronoun as the default has been proscribed. Some male writers get around this problem by defaulting to the feminine singular pronoun, which I think is icky. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
You can learn a lot about good management by working under someone who is a bad manager. Charles Murray
We have a new lower class that’s large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that’s increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America. Charles Murray
I’m not like Ann Coulter. Charles Murray
When ‘The Bell Curve’ came out, I’d have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak. Charles Murray
The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing. Charles Murray
Trumpism’ is the expression by the white working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class. Charles Murray
People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Charles Murray
I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
Don’t argue that you can’t find a job that pays enough to support yourself. You can. You just can’t find a job that will support you in the style to which you have been accustomed. Charles Murray
When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren’t telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can’t find it. An amazing number of them aren’t interested in working. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
The new upper class devotes incredible amounts of effort to raising their kids but that also includes incredible amounts of effort in getting their kids into the right preschool in some elite communities which I think is going a little bit too far. Charles Murray
When I’m talking about the white working class, here’s what I’m defining: high school degree, no more, and working in a blue-collar job or a low-skilled service job. When I’m talking about the white, upper-middle class, I’m talking about people who work in the professions or managerial jobs and have at least a college degree. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
It’s strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they’ve fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class. Charles Murray
I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system. Charles Murray
We are under a moral obligation to do our best to realize the best that human beings can be. To neglect that obligation is to waste our lives. Charles Murray
The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance. Charles Murray
Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up. Charles Murray
The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic. Charles Murray
I don’t lose any sleep over people calling me names. Charles Murray
There’s a big difference in outcomes between children who grow up without a father and children who grow up with a married set of parents. Charles Murray
I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty. Charles Murray
A part of me always felt like an outsider and still does. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
By the end of writing ‘Losing Ground,’ I realized I was a libertarian. Charles Murray
When America installs a minimum income, it’s going to be doing it in a very different historical context than Switzerland or Sweden or Germany, or any other country might do it. And we’re doing it in a context where it has the potential, I think, for much better consequences than in those other countries. Charles Murray
I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do. Charles Murray
Certainly, I find that ‘Mere Christianity’ speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me. Charles Murray
I want to keep the government out of the business of giving incentives to have or not have kids, or incentives to marry or not marry. Charles Murray
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? Charles Murray
My family was pretty much the way a family was supposed to be, a Norman Rockwell kind of family, I’m afraid. I say ‘I’m afraid’ because it will just confirm my critics’ view that my views about family are unrealistic. Charles Murray
Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground. Charles Murray
In 1960, it was still – no nostalgia here – an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods. Charles Murray
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. Charles Murray
My whole career has been one wrong answer after another as far as the left is concerned. Charles Murray
I want the new upper class to start preaching what it practices. They are getting married and staying married in large numbers. They work like crazy, long hours. They even do better going to church than lots of the rest of America. Why not just say, these are not just choices we have made for ourselves. These are rich, rewarding ways of living. Charles Murray
People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. – there is no government money – because they think the work we do is valuable. Charles Murray
