James Q. Wilson Quotes

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.

Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.

I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone’s health care.

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.

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.

In terms of other functions, we are making a mistake about insisting on a public school monopoly.

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

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

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.

A government without the power of defense! It is a solecism.

There are no more liberals Theyve all been mugged.

Without Liberty, Law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without Law, Liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

There are no more liberals They’ve all been mugged.

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.

I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.

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.

I mean that the function of the police is to solve problems that have law-enforcement consequences in a way that is based on a genuine partnership with the neighborhood in both the venting of the problem and the discussion of the solution.

In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.

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

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

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

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.

One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

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.