53 Quotes by James Q. Wilson

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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