Quotes from The Bell Curve

By Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray (1994)

• The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life—conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kinds of screenplays or newspaper feature stories that people choose to write—the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and—above all—truth.#
  InequalityEthics
• America had already achieved enough objective equalization in its schools by 1964 so that it was hard to pick up any effects of unequal school quality#
  History
• Regression to the mean works both ways: If you start with a population of dull children and then find the IQs of their parents, you will find that the parents were closer to the mean (on average) than their children. Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon, not a biological one.#
  Statistics
• 91 percent of the raw black-white differential in wages and 90 percent of the raw Latino-white differential disappear after controlling for IQ.#
• Ethnic differences in higher education, occupations, and wages are strikingly diminished after controlling for IQ. Often they vanish. In this sense, America has equalized these central indicators of social success.#
  Education
• The impulse to think that environmental sources of difference are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.#
  GeneticsBiology
• There is no longer an important technical debate over the conclusion that the cultural content of test items is not the cause of group differences in scores.#
  Education
• The common stereotype of the talented-but-disadvantaged-youth-denied-educational-opportunity does not seem to exist in significant numbers any longer.#
  Education
• Voltaire’s view that “the lower classes should be guided, not educated,” was typical until this century.#
  Education
• Heritability describes something about a population of people, not an individual. It makes no more sense to talk about the heritability of an individual’s IQ than it does to talk about his birthrate.#
  GeneticsStatistics
• The more we succeed in giving every youngster a chance to develop his or her latent cognitive ability, the more we equalize the environmental sources of differences in intelligence. The irony is that as America equalizes the circumstances of people’s lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined differences in genes.#
  GeneticsBiologyScience

Aristotle, Politics (350 B.C.)

• All men believe that justice means equality in some sense…. The question we must keep in mind is, equality or inequality in what sort of thing.#
  Inequality