14 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.