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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

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James Q. Wilson
Age: 80 †
Born: 1931
Born: May 27
Died: 2012
Died: March 2
Academic
Criminologist
Political Scientist
University Teacher
Denver
Colorado
James Quinn Wilson
Persons
Failing
Drunks
Person
Hundred
Arresting
Single
Harmed
Community
Unjust
Sense
Score
Seems
Drunk
Vagrant
Anything
Destroy
Vagrants
May
Entire
Identifiable

More quotes by James Q. Wilson

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Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.
James Q. Wilson
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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
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There are no more liberals Theyve all been mugged.
James Q. Wilson
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Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers rather, 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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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
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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
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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
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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. Wilson
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A government without the power of defense! It is a solecism.
James Q. Wilson
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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
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I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.
James Q. Wilson
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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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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
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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
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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. Wilson
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Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.
James Q. Wilson
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But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government
James Q. Wilson
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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. Wilson
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Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.
James Q. Wilson