James Q. Wilson quotes
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“In terms of other functions, we are making a mistake about insisting on a public school monopoly.”
-- James Q. WilsonSource : "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
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“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.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“Broken Window Theory: Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
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“There aren't any liberals left in New York. They've all been mugged by now.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“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. WilsonSource : "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1, 1995.
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“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”
-- James Q. WilsonSource : William Blackstone, St. George Tucker (1996). “Blackstone's Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States, and of the Commonwealth of Virginia: With an Appendix to Each Volume, Containing Short Tracts Upon Such Subjects as Appeared Necessary to Form a Connecte”, p.315, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.
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“What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
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“Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“A government without the power of defense! It is a solecism.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.”
-- James Q. WilsonSource : James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.23, American Enterprise Institute
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“There are no more liberals Theyve all been mugged.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
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“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 -
“I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone's health care”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“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.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“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. WilsonSource : James Q. Wilson (1997). “The Moral Sense”, p.166, Simon and Schuster
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“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.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“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 -
“I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.”
-- James Q. Wilson -
“But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government”
-- James Q. Wilson -
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“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. WilsonSource : "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1, 1995.
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“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. WilsonSource : "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
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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”
-- James Q. WilsonSource : "No Easy Answers: An Interview with James Q. Wilson". Interview with William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, reason.com. February 1995.
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“Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.”
-- James Q. WilsonSource : James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.2, American Enterprise Institute
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