Walter E. Williams Quotes

Social science has been established not to set policy but to measure its results.

All policy is targeted in one way or another.

The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?

Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'

In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.

Good intentions rarely make good policy.

It's really important that policy be properly designed. It's not enough just to.. .get angry over a subject.

In a mature democracy any proposed policy should be subjected to a close analysis of its likely benefits and costs.

I wanted to work on policy because I think it really makes a difference.

There are a lot of policies that don't work out that are nevertheless worth doing.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

Good policy makes good politics and what I've done has been good politics.

What succeeds best politically does not always do so policy wise and vice versa.

Successful and unsuccessful political policies have one commonalty. The people who created the policies thought they would be successful.

I prefer to work at the policy level, on trying to fix flawed government policies.

You have to have a sense of what it looks like, not from the point of view of the policymaker but from the point of view of those who are at the receiving end of your policies.

Everybody wants the world to be a better place, and some think that government actions can bring that about. But they don't take into consideration that government actions can often do more harm than good.

I think that policy matters. I'm a policy guy.

We are specialists who have something special to say. We have had no problem with working in any state interested in evaluating their policies.

Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.

The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted.

I'm a really big believer - this is not a statement about President [Barack] Obama, but whoever is president - that good policy is really important.

My mantra about everything that has to do with public policy is: identify and reject the false choice.

I don't think in national categories. For me it [policy] is about concepts and substance.