Top 28 James Q. Wilson Quotes
#1. In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.
James Q. Wilson
#2. Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.
James Q. Wilson
#3. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#4. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#5. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#6. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#7. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#8. Public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.
James Q. Wilson
#9. Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.
James Q. Wilson
#10. There aren't any liberals left in New York. They've all been mugged by now.
James Q. Wilson
#11. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#13. What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.
James Q. Wilson
#14. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#15. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#16. 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
#17. Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.
James Q. Wilson
#18. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#19. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#20. In terms of other functions, we are making a mistake about insisting on a public school monopoly.
James Q. Wilson
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone's health care.
James Q. Wilson
#24. A government without the power of defense! It is a solecism.
James Q. Wilson
#25. 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.
James Q. Wilson
#26. I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.
James Q. Wilson
#27. But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.
James Q. Wilson
#28. One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.
James Q. Wilson
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