JAMES Q. WILSON

Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.

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.

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

No one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There are no more liberals. They've all been mugged.

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.

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

When the Supreme Court renders an important decision, the reasons it gives are often more important than the choice it has made.

Making the bureaucracy accountable to the President in any comprehensive and enduring way is impossible. Making it alert to his preferences is possible in those cases where Presidents put loyal and competent subordinates in charge of making decisions.

Sometimes the agency head is picked because he or she is thought to be an expert on the subject, but many times the President has no real idea of the content or policy implications of this expertise.

Parties perform, to some degree, at least three functions in a democratic government. They recruit candidates, mobilize voters, and assemble power within the formal government.

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.

Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.

One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

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.

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.

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.

What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.