Top 50 Charles Murray Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The sciences form a hierarchy. “Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology,” wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.”

— Charles Murray

2. “A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you?”

— Charles Murray

3. “The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.”

— Charles Murray

4. “Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, “I made a difference.”

— Charles Murray

5. “In the decades ahead, a life well-lived will often have to be one that does not involve a job traditionally defined. A universal basic income will be an essential part of the transition to a world unlike any in the history of our species.”

— Charles Murray

6. “Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards.”

— Charles Murray

7. “The responsibilities of marriage induce young men to settle down, focus, and get to work.”

— Charles Murray

8. “To notice a difference is to have an opinion about it – unless one refuses to think. And that is my ultimate objection to nonjudgmentalism. We can refuse to voice our judgments, but we cannot keep from having them unless we refuse to think about what is before our eyes.”

— Charles Murray

9. “Under this hypothesis, genetically-grounded personality differences widen in the most gender-egalitarian societies for the simplest of reasons: Both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.”

— Charles Murray

10. “In The Price of Admission, journalist Daniel Golden documents the ways in which elite schools manage to find room for the children of alums, big donors, celebrities, athletes, the elite college’s own faculty, and wealthy parents whose estates might eventually make their heirs into big donors.20.”

— Charles Murray

11. “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less.”

— Charles Murray

12. “Many curmudgeons believe that a malady afflicts many of today’s twenty-somethings: their sense of entitlement. It is their impression that too many of you think doing routine office tasks is beneath you, and your supervisors are insufficiently sensitive to your needs. Curmudgeons are also likely to think that you have a higher opinion of your abilities than your performance warrants.”

— Charles Murray

13. “A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture that encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals, and enables them to do so.”

— Charles Murray

14. “But it was not until Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.”

— Charles Murray

15. “Nice and good are different. Being nice involves immediate actions and immediate consequences – you give water to the thirsty and comfort to the afflicted right here, right now. Being good involves living in the world so that you contribute to the welfare of your fellow human beings.”

— Charles Murray

16. “He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow citizens.” That is Adam Smith talking, the apostle of laissez-faire.”

— Charles Murray

17. “All the other virtues, and the living of a virtuous life, depend on them. If you took an introductory philosophy course in college, they were probably translated from the Greek as courage, justice, temperance, and prudence.”

— Charles Murray

18. “Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when the exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.”

— Charles Murray

19. “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.”

— Charles Murray

20. “After a couple of hours of intense work, I look at the paragraph I’m struggling with and know that it will be easier to finish it tomorrow. Other writers who talk about their routines usually make the same point – three or four hours a day is about the maximum that can be expected.”

— Charles Murray

21. “Changing the new upper class by force majeure won’t work and isn’t a good idea in any case. The new upper class will change only if its members decide that it is in the interest of themselves and of their families to change. And possibly also because they decide it is in the interest of the country they love.”

— Charles Murray

22. “When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America’s more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.”

— Charles Murray

23. “Nor does one have the option of saying that differences exist but that one will not judge them. To notice a difference is to have an opinion about it – unless one refuses to think. And that is my ultimate objection to the nonjudgmental frame of mind. We can refuse to voice our opinions, our judgments, but we cannot keep from having them unless we refuse to think about what is before our eyes.”

— Charles Murray

24. “The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010.”

— Charles Murray

25. “They don’t know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.”

— Charles Murray

26. “Government gets involved in whom a business may hire, how much it pays, and the benefits it provides. The government may make it next to impossible to fire someone without risking a lawsuit.”

— Charles Murray

27. “Why did the burst of activity fade so rapidly? The specific explanations diverge in their particulars, but they agree on the central point that, as H. Floris Cohen, put it, “the root cause of its decline is to be found in the Faith, and in the ability of its orthodox upholders to stifle once-flowering science.”16 To Islamic scholar G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam was never able to accept that scientific research is a means of glorifying God.”

— Charles Murray

28. “All systematic civil disobedience should involve acts that are malum prohibitum: illegal because the state says so, not because they are bad in themselves.”

— Charles Murray

29. “A variant of the NIT puts it within our power to end poverty, provide for comfortable retirement and medical care for everyone, and – as a bonus that is probably more important than any of the immediate effects – revitalize American civil society.”

— Charles Murray

30. “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. The few who do have it made.”

— Charles Murray

31. “Considerable social science research has found that constant praise of children can backfire, because it so often consists of telling children how smart they are, not of praising children for the things they actually do. As a result, many children become protective of their image of being smart and are reluctant to take chances that might actually damage that image.”

— Charles Murray

32. “When you are faced with a challenge that is far beyond your skills, the result is anxiety. When your skills are high but the challenges are low, you are bored. If you have low skills and the challenge is also low, you are able to do the job but are unlikely to become absorbed in it – apathy is the characteristic response. But when the skills are high and in balance with a stiff challenge, flow occurs. It is the Aristotelian principle on a two-dimensional plot.”

— Charles Murray

33. “PURPOSE A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.”

— Charles Murray

34. “They are also increasingly isolated. The new isolation involves spatial, economic, educational, cultural, and, to some degree, political isolation. This growing isolation has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power.”

— Charles Murray

35. “Discarding the welfare state in favor of a universal basic income is no longer something that would be economically feasible in America’s future. It is economically feasible right now.”

— Charles Murray

36. “The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.”

— Charles Murray

37. “If I’m wrong, and you find yourself in an organization where sucking up is in fact a good way to get ahead, look for a new job. It’s not a quality organization after all, no matter how glittering its public reputation may be. Life is too short to work there.”

— Charles Murray

38. “Here, I put it as an assertion: If the criteria for the choice are rootedness in human experience, seriousness of purpose, and intellectual depth, choosing the classic aesthetic tradition over postmodernism is not a close call.”

— Charles Murray

39. “It is said that there comes a point in every mathematics student’s education when he hears himself saying to the teacher, “I think I understand” – and that’s the point at which he has hit a wall. Making sure that all gifted students hit their own personal walls is crucial for developing the empathy with the rest of the world. When they see their less lucky peers struggle academically, they need to be able to say “I know how it feels,“ – and be telling the truth.”

— Charles Murray

40. “That’s the UBI. A cash grant, with a surtax, funded by eliminating the transfers that currently exist. I require that $3,000 be devoted to health care, but otherwise I will argue that many of the best effects of the UBI are fostered by the least direction: “Here’s the money. Use it as you see fit. Your life is in your hands.”

— Charles Murray

41. “The twin propositions of this book are that we are at the end of the American project as the founders intended it, but that opportunities are opening for preserving the best qualities of the American project in a new incarnation.”

— Charles Murray

42. “Some people pursue happiness in ways that tend to be accompanied by large incomes, others in ways that tend to be accompanied by lower incomes. In a free society, these choices are made voluntarily, with psychic rewards balanced against monetary rewards. Income inequality is accordingly large. So what?”

— Charles Murray

43. “Since they are in fact academically gifted, it is fine to tell them that. Trying to hide their academic ability from them would be futile anyway. But they must also be told explicitly, forcefully, and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift that they have done nothing to deserve. They are not superior human beings, but very, very lucky ones. They should feel humbled by their good luck.”

— Charles Murray

44. “But the people who have recently come to dominance and those who will come to dominance in the new century are increasingly aware – or can be made aware – that freedom still works in their own lives and that they effectively exempt themselves from most of the laws that take freedom away from other people.”

— Charles Murray

45. “More important: Unless you’re in the hard sciences, the process of writing is your most valuable single tool for developing better ideas. The process of writing is the dominant source of intellectual creativity.”

— Charles Murray

46. “To live in today’s world is not only to have access to all the best that has come before, but also to have a breadth and ease of access that is incomparably greater than that enjoyed even by our parents, let alone earlier generations.”

— Charles Murray

47. “The argument is that people who know the most about an artistic field are drawn to certain works. The qualities that draw their attention are those that offer the biggest payoff in the aesthetics of the art, and this payoff is based on qualities distinct from subjective sentiments.”

— Charles Murray

48. “Highly familistic, consensual cultures have been the norm throughout history and the world. Modern Europe has been the oddball.”

— Charles Murray

49. “Suppose that this reading of history is correct. Today’s creative elites are not just overwhelmingly secular but often hostile to the idea that transcendental goods have any meaning. Such is the reason to fear that well-made entertainments are as much as we can hope for. Great art requires a source of inspiration that the people who produce those entertainments are not tapping.”

— Charles Murray

50. “Most recently, the task of assembling the genetic story for specific phenotypic traits has begun. It is still in its early stages, but progress is accelerating nonlinearly. Hence the nervousness that has prevented open discussion of what’s going on in the geneticists’ parallel universe: the fear that we will discover scary population differences in what I have called cognitive repertoires.”

— Charles Murray