Richard J. Herrnstein > Quotes

“The moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse, with significant economic consequences.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“the use of tests endured and grew because society’s largest institutions—schools, military forces, industries, governments—depend significantly on measurable individual differences.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Richard Lynn was able to assemble eleven studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the U.S. overall population average, about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Cognitive sorting continues from the time that students enter college to the time they get a degree”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“How large is the black-white difference?

The usual answer to this question is one standard deviation. In discussing IQ tests, for example, the black mean is commonly given as 85, the white mean as 100, and the standard deviation as 15.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Most Americans think that crime has gotten far too high. But in the ruminations about how the nation has reached this state and what might be done, too little attention has been given to one of the best-documented relationships in the study of crime: As a group, criminals are below average in intelligence.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“How good a predictor of job productivity is a cognitive test score compared to a job interview? Reference checks? College transcript? The answer, probably surprising to many, is that the test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure. This is the conclusion to be drawn from a meta-analysis on the different predictors of job performance, as shown in the table below.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Once again, academia and the mass media are straining every muscle to suppress debate.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Many academic intellectuals hold middle-class values in contempt”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“The causes of human deficiencies in intelligence—or parenting, or social behavior, or work behavior—lay outside the individual. They were caused by flaws in society.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Literate cultures everywhere and throughout history have had words for saying that some people are smarter than others. Given the survival value of intelligence, the concept must be still older than that.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“The documentation becomes especially extensive when we come to a topic so controversial that many readers will have a “This can’t possibly be true” reaction.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“A true cognitive elite requires a technological society.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“the time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject. It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“he was led to put in formal terms what most people had always taken for granted: People vary in their intellectual abilities and the differences matter, to them personally and to society.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“because economic success in life depends in part on the talents measured by IQ tests, and because social standing depends in part on economic success, it follows that social standing is bound to be based to some extent on inherited differences.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“To those who held the behaviorist view, human potential was almost perfectly malleable, shaped by the environment.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“I don’t happen to agree with everything in it, but that is beside the point.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Darwin had asserted that the transmission of inherited intelligence was a key step in human evolution, driving our simian ancestors apart from the other apes.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Within a few years, the letters “IQ” had entered the American vernacular, where they remain today as a universally understood synonym for intelligence.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Gossip about who in the tribe is cleverest has probably been a topic of conversation around the fire since fires, and conversation, were invented.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“But there can be no real progress in solving America’s social problems when they are as misperceived as they are today. What good can come of understanding the relationship of intelligence to social structure and public policy? Little good can come without it.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Among the most firmly established facts about criminal offenders is that their distribution of IQ scores differs from that of the population at large. Taking the scientific literature as a whole, criminal offenders have average IQs of about 92, eight points below the mean. More serious or chronic offenders generally have lower scores than more casual offenders. The relationship of IQ to criminality is especially pronounced in the small fraction of the population, primarily young men, who constitute the chronic criminals that account for a disproportionate amount of crime. Offenders”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America’s future.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“Among the dozens of hostile articles that have thus far appeared, none has successfully refuted any of its science.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“People differ in their talents, their intellectual strengths and weaknesses, their preferred forms of imagery, their mental vigor.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“The proportion of CEOs who came from wealthy families had dropped from almost half in 1900 and a third in 1950 to 5.5 percent by 1976.23 The CEO of 1976 was still disproportionately likely to be Episcopalian but much less so than in 1900—and by 1976 he was also disproportionately likely to be Jewish, unheard of in 1920 or earlier. In short, social and economic background was no longer nearly as important in 1976 as in the first half of the century. Educational”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

“The course of learning is affected by intelligence, in Spearman’s view, but it was not the thing in itself. Spearmanian intelligence was a measure of a person’s capacity for complex mental work.”
― Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life