James Q. Wilson
James Q. Wilson
James Quinn Wilsonwas an American academic, political scientist, and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth27 May 1931
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.
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 know my political ideas affect what I write, but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.
But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government
In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.