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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 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.

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.

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.

IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.

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.

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.

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.

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

Ecumenical niceness is just pabulum.

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.

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

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.

I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves.

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

I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My whole career has been one wrong answer after another as far as the left is concerned.

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

By the end of writing 'Losing Ground,' I realized I was a libertarian.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

In 1960, it was still - no nostalgia here - an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods.

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.

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

People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. - there is no government money - because they think the work we do is valuable.

The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

I'm not like Ann Coulter.

It's much more fun to talk to an audience that includes a lot of people who disagree with me.

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.

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.

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 am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.

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.

Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground.

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.

I had friends, but I was always a bit weird.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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