“The political process in Washington is systemically corrupt in ways that make fundamental reforms impossible. Not improbable but impossible.”

“discriminating between regulations that really do foster a public good and really must be obeyed, and those that are trivial and may be ignored—is going to be one of the major contributions of systematic civil disobedience.”

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“It seems increasingly clear that even when environmental factors are at issue, the role of nonshared environment dominates that of shared environment in explaining behavioral development,”

“what most interventions accomplish is to move children from awful environments to ones that are merely below average, and such changes are limited in their potential consequences when heritability so constrains the limits of environmental effects.”

“The NSA and other government agencies can read our e-mail, listen to our telephone conversations, track our web surfing, and, in some cases, bug our homes or workplaces, and then store all this information indefinitely.”

“The environment in which a child is raised does make a difference. The question is not *whether* but *how much*.”

“even a heritability of .6 leaves room for considerable change if the changes in environment are commensurably large.”

“The most ominous downsides of IT are associated with surveillance of private activities.”

“no one doubts that, if all children had the advantages of the most fortunate, some narrowing of inequalities would occur.”

“when a society makes good on the ideal of letting every youngster have equal access to the things that allow latent cognitive ability to develop, it is in effect driving the environmental component of IQ variation closer and closer to nil.”

“As time goes on, it’s not going to be just police who need to worry about bad behavior being recorded. So will corrupt bureaucrats, plus the larger number who misuse their authority to browbeat the people they are supposed to serve.”

“If brighter siblings get more education, have higher-level occupations, and are employed more of the time, they are going to make more money.”

“whatever variation is left over for the environment to explain (i.e., 40 percent of the total variation, if the heritability of IQ is taken to be .6), relatively little can be traced to the shared environments created by families.”

“the lack of a visual record will eventually be treated by the courts as police malpractice.”

“the B.A. went to the sibling with the higher IQ in 88 percent of the cases. Given the wage premium associated with college degrees, it should come as no surprise if we subsequently find that wages are also associated with sibling differences in IQ.”

“the more general the measure of intelligence—the closer it is to g—the higher is the heritability.”

“A few years ago, inexpensive body cameras became available. … In jurisdictions using this technology, the consistent result has been that the cameras not only deter police misconduct but also deter people from falsely claiming police misconduct.”

“differences in mean years of education translate into wide differences in the probability of getting a college degree”

“the heritability of IQ falls somewhere within a broad range and that, for purposes of our discussion, a value of .6 ±.2 does no violence to any of the competent and responsible recent estimates.”

“The vulnerability of bad behavior in the total information environment of the Internet is much more important to the prosperity of corporations than their vulnerability to government inspection.”

“Same household, same parents, different IQs – and markedly different educational careers.”