Timothy P. Carney > Quotes

“Europe historically was populated by two types of people. The first type all followed the rules, worked together, and kept order. The second type all liked to go their own way, take risks, and test boundaries. Then one day, the second group all got on a boat and sailed to America.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“O] n average,” Brad Wilcox writes, with the data to back it up, “Americans who regularly attend services at a church, synagogue, temple or mosque are less likely to cheat on their partners; less likely to abuse them; more likely to enjoy happier marriages; and less likely to have been divorced.” 13”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“On a more fundamental level, research suggests that religious people—all else being equal—are happier than less religious people.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“But what if what the working class—white, black, Hispanic, etc.— needs most isn’t a check from the government but inclusion in community? And what if the most accessible form of community—the church—is under constant assault by both culture and the government? And finally, what if the elites frowning upon the deplorable poor won’t include them in their community, citing their deplorability?”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“Local and state governments can help civil society by building towns and cities in ways more conducive to neighborliness and community building. Walkability is a big thing. Mixing residential and commercial development would create real neighborhoods where people can walk to the corner store for a gallon of milk and run into their neighbors. It could allow for “third places” like neighborhood pubs, barbershops, and sandwich shops.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“Surely man has free will, and there are famous stories of humans persisting in and strengthening their faith all alone. Saint Patrick was a slave left alone in a field with sheep in pagan Ireland as a boy, and he prayed without ceasing until he could escape—eventually returning as a bishop and a missionary. So we shouldn’t deny people individual agency by saying their environment determined their outcome. Yet we know that environment helps determine our outcomes. That’s why parents work hard to find the right school and community in which to raise their children. If people thought environment didn’t help determine outcomes, they wouldn’t expend so much time and money to obtain a great environment—family, school, neighborhood—for their children. They’d just say, 'Hey, kid, make good decisions.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“The early primary results show that Trump Country is made up of the places where civil society has eroded the most. Trump’s cities and towns and counties are the ones where community bonds are the weakest.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“But the most common “conformity” critique of the 1950s, which is surely not all wrong, is that individual choice was repressed by overbearing cultural expectations and even by the law.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“Granting that you have more money than others, and that you don’t deserve such wealth—but stopping there—allows you to settle the score by paying your taxes and advocating more redistribution. This reductive attitude toward inequality has the added comfort of justifying nasty judgments about the other side.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“Today’s maximum-effort, high-anxiety, low-trust parenting isn’t high-quality parenting. It isn’t producing better results for children or for parents.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences

“Only in self-sacrifice can man live fully as man, Catholic teaching states. Some people sacrifice for an idea, but really, John Paul argues, we give up our lives only for other people—or for God. And that true sacrifice requires love, which in turn requires true human contact. Community bonds make that love real. And so these two popes show us that true inclusion of the poor—by living in community with them—is the only way to carry out our duty to serve the poor.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“Parents worry that they are failing if their kids are not prodigies by age eight, or aren’t on the path to dominance in violin, tennis, or math. Most parents don’t actually submit their child to the regimen of a Tiger Woods or a Serena Williams, but way too many parents feel guilty that they’re not doing more.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences

“And if you want to know what happens to individuals left without a community in which to live most fully as human, where men and women are abandoned, left without small communities in which to flourish, we should visit Trump Country.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“One 2023 paper in the Journal of Pediatrics concluded that “a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences

“Sociologist Douglas Massey has shown that as racial segregation has diminished, class-based segregation has increased in America.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“When a mom walked away from the playground and grabbed a can of Miller Lite, I was as proud as if one of my players had run the bases in the proper order. I had helped build a place where parents could bring their children—and ignore them.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences

“The primary killer of U.S. factory jobs isn’t China or Mexico but robots.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse – A Washington Post Bestseller: Church, Community, and the American Dream

“Bad anthropology fosters an overly individualistic, materialistic, and pessimistic culture, which is family unfriendly.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences