Charles Murray
Scientist
1943-01-08
Quotes by Charles Murray
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.
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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.
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