James Q. Wilson Quotes

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  • There is no way the American public will sit still for the banning of or putting any significant restrictions on the kinds of guns they want.

    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
  • Police ought to protect communities as well as individuals.... Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police - and the rest of us - ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.

    James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.138, American Enterprise Institute
  • A government without the power of defense! It is a solecism.

  • We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

  • Many Americans have lost confidence in the way our criminal courts assess guilt and innocence. Whatever one thinks of the verdicts, the recent trials of O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and various defendants in preschool molestation cases have been lengthy, lawyer-dominated soap operas in which the search for truth has been subordinated to the manipulation of procedures.

  • Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers.

  • During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing ... That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.

  • I believe that the high rates of property crime (and some of the increase in violent crime) are part of the price you pay for freedom.

    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1, 1995.
  • One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

    Broken  
    James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.126, American Enterprise Institute
  • [in 1998] I know my political ideas affect what I write but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.

    Writing   Land   Ideas  
    "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
  • I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.

    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1, 1995.
  • Community-based policing has now come to mean everything. It's a slogan. It has come to mean so many different things that people who endorse it, such as the Congress of the United States, do not know what they are talking about.

    Mean  
    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
  • The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise - and occasionally the application - of the view that all people, and not just one's own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.

    James Q. Wilson (1997). “The Moral Sense”, p.281, Simon and Schuster
  • Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.

    James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.132, American Enterprise Institute
  • I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone's health care

    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
  • In terms of other functions, we are making a mistake about insisting on a public school monopoly.

    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
  • A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.

    Broken  
    James Q. Wilson (1983). “Thinking about Crime”, Vintage
  • It's no surprise that academics in this country have been generally suspicious of business or that in a time like this, when general public confidence in the corporation has fallen, the expressions of hostility grow sharper.

  • If a radical devolution of powers was possible, it would have been done before. The assumption of states' rights is gone. There's no support for it in the Supreme Court and there's no support for it in public opinion.

    "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
  • The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.

  • Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

    Broken  
    James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.126, American Enterprise Institute
  • In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.

    James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.23, American Enterprise Institute
  • The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many ... , myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.

  • There aren't any liberals left in New York. They've all been mugged by now.

  • But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government

  • Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.

  • The selection process has been powerful enough to produce one indisputable outcome: the family is a universal human institution. . . . In virtually every society into which historians or anthropologists have inquired, one finds people living together on the basis of kinship ties and having responsibility for raising children. . . . Even in societies where men and women have relatively unrestricted sexual access to one another beginning at an early age, marriage is still the basis for family formation. It is desired by the partners and expected by society.

  • Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.

    James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.2, American Enterprise Institute
  • Public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.

    Broken  
  • What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 36 quotes from the Academic James Q. Wilson, starting from May 27, 1931! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    James Q. Wilson quotes about: Community Police

    James Q. Wilson

    • Born: May 27, 1931
    • Died: March 2, 2012
    • Occupation: Academic