James Q. Wilson Quotes

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.

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.

Mankind's moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is, rather, a small candle flame, casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and sputtering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. But brought close to the heart and cupped in one's hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the soul.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Boys are more likely to develop a masculine personality and acquire strong moral standards when they have a loving and nurturant rather than a threatening or fear-inspiring father.

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

Half [of] us approve of other people's daughters having children out of wedlock, but hardly any of us approve of that for our daughters. [We] don't wish to be 'judgmental,' unless [we are judging] something we care about, [like] the well-being of the people we cherish

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

If the moral senses can conflict with one another and with what prudent action requires under particular circumstances, then living a good life requires striking a delicate balance among those senses and between them and prudent self-interest.

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

Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.

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

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.

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.

Public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.

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.