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.

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 don't lose any sleep over people calling me names.

I'm not like Ann Coulter.

It's much more fun to talk to an audience that includes a lot of people who disagree with me.

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.

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.

I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.

I had friends, but I was always a bit weird.

Thailand was the transforming experience in my life. Thailand is where I grew up.

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.

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.

Certainly, I find that 'Mere Christianity' speaks to me. So why am I still an agnostic? Beats me.

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.

The religiosity of Americans I don't think has ever been determined by how much money they make.

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.

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.

As for tattoos, it does no good to remind curmudgeons that tattoos have been around for millennia. Yes, we will agree, tattoos have been common - first among savage tribes and then, more recently, among the lowest classes of Western societies.

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.

No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions.

Trumpism' is the expression by the white working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class.

I have always believed in enforcing the border, and doing that before you do amnesty.

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.

When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren't telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can't find it. An amazing number of them aren't interested in working.

I hate reading reviews.

Hey, I'm a libertarian. I think out of control spending messes up everything.

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.

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.

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.

IQ is equivalent to chip speed, and superior chip speed will enable certain things that inferior chip speed will not enable. The same is true about just about any human attribute you can think of that has no relationship to IQ whatsoever.

The government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.

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.

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.

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.

The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic.