Charles A. Murray Quotes

We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

— Charles A. Murray

“What a racially segregated system once taught the young black about living with his inferiority is now taught by a benevolent social welfare system. The difference was that in an earlier age a black parent could fight the competing influences.”

— Charles A. Murray

“The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.”

— Charles A. Murray

“Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.”

— Charles A. Murray

“The welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.”

— Charles A. Murray

“Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.”

— Charles A. Murray

“When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”

— Charles A. Murray

People need self-respect, but 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.

— Charles A. Murray

The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.

— Charles A. Murray

“Educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top.”

— Charles A. Murray

“We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government.”

— Charles A. Murray

“The most troubling aspect of social policy towards the poor in late 20th century America is or how much it costs, but what it has bought.”

— Charles A. Murray

“It was the transmutation of the classical liberal intellectual foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and that pushed European accomplishment so far ahead of all other cultures and civilizations around the world.”

— Charles A. Murray

“The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it "undermines the work ethic," but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.”

— Charles A. Murray

“It was raining cats and dogs, and I fell in a poodle.”

— Charles A. Murray