Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground.
I don't lose any sleep over people calling me names.
This is what old guys do. They get dark and pessimistic.
I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.
Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity.
I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters.
By the end of writing 'Losing Ground,' I realized I was a libertarian.
Hey, I'm a libertarian. I think out of control spending messes up everything.
Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.
The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.
I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty.
The government is a terrible employer, and that goes for national service jobs as well.
You can learn a lot about good management by working under someone who is a bad manager.
IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.
It's much more fun to talk to an audience that includes a lot of people who disagree with me.
The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.
The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.
I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician - that's hard.
Certainly, I find that 'Mere Christianity' speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me.
No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions.
I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.
There's a big difference between being good and being nice. Being good involves tough choices - tough love.
To talk about the superiority of an ethnic group on the basis of some points of difference on IQ tests is idiotic.
In 1960, it was still - no nostalgia here - an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods.
Trumpism' is the expression by the white working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class.
People are voluntarily giving money to A.E.I. - there is no government money - because they think the work we do is valuable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.