James Q. Wilson > Quotes

“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.”
― James Q. Wilson

“Broken Window Theory: Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.”
― James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling

“Regulation-writers find it much easier to address safety than health hazards. The former are technically easier to find, describe, assess, and control than the latter. A worker falls from a platform. The cause is clear - no railing. The effect is clear - a broken leg. The cost is easily calculated - so many days in the hospital, so many days of lost wages, so much to build a railing. The directive is easy to write: "Install railings on platforms." But if a worker develops cancer fifteen years after starting work in a chemical plant, the cause of the cancer will be uncertain and controversial. The cost of the disease will be hard to calculate. The solution will be hard to specify:”
― James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It

“If the moral senses can conflict with one another and with what prudent action requires under particular circumstances, then living a good life requires striking a delicate balance among those senses and between them and prudent self-interest.”
― James Q. Wilson

“Mankind’s moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is, rather, a small candle flame, casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and sputtering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. But brought close to the heart and cupped in one’s hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the soul.”
― James Q. Wilson

“Half [of] us approve of other people's daughters having children out of wedlock, but hardly any of us approve of that for our daughters. [We] don't wish to be 'judgmental,' unless [we are judging] something we care about, [like] the well-being of the people we cherish”
― James Q. Wilson

“The idea of autonomous individuals choosing everything—their beliefs and values, their history and traditions, their social forms and family structures—is a vainglorious idea, and could only have been invented by thinkers who felt compelled to construct society out of theories.”
― James Q. Wilson

“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

“The fact that there is so much immoral behavior is not evidence of the weakness of the moral senses. The problem of wrong action arises because of the conflict among the several moral senses that exist, because of the struggle between morality and self-interest, and because of the corrosive effect of those forces that blunt the moral senses. We must often choose between duty and sympathy or between fairness and loyalty.”
― James Q. Wilson

“How can there be a moral sense if everywhere we find cruelty and combat, sometimes on a monstrous scale?
One rather paradoxical answer is that man’s attacks against his fellow man reveal his moral sense because they express his social nature. Contrary to Freud, it is not simply their innate aggressiveness that leads men to engage in battles against their rivals; contrary to Hobbes, it is not only to control their innate wildness that men create governments. Men are less likely to fight alone against one other person than to fight in groups against other groups. It is the desire to earn or retain the respect and good will of their fellows that keeps soldiers fighting even against fearsome odds, leads men to accept even the more distorted or implausible judgments of their peers, and persuades many of us to devalue the beliefs and claims of outsiders.”
― James Q. Wilson