James Q. Wilson

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

“Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There are no more liberals They've 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”