James Q. Wilson Quotes

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Every society has the criminals it deserves.

Reality is: Should people steal in this world? Yes. How do I know they should? They all do.

I think I was a pretty normal student; I just followed most of my friends.

We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.

Thus, anybody who follows this nature and gives way its states will be led into quarrels and conflicts, and go against the conventions and rules of society, and will end up a criminal.

People tend to think of psychopaths as criminals. In fact, the majority of psychopaths aren't criminal.

We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

The number one cause of crime is criminals.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone

During and shortly after puberty human beings have an indubitable tendency to loosen their allegiance to all traditional rites and social norms of their culture

… people who are armed make comparatively unattractive victims. A criminal might not know if any one civilian is armed, but if it becomes known that a large number of civilians do carry weapons, criminals will become warier.

People interest me a lot: why we are kind, why we are cruel, how we learn the difference, what makes us act in ways contrary to those we've been socialized with.

I wasn't stealing cars at like, six. But I've always been bad.

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

Our criminal institutions are full of creeps like you who do wrong things, and many of them were driven to these crimes by the horrible force called music.

It does not seem possible to think of oneself as normal without thinking that some other kind of person is pathological.

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.

atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

Most criminals are not born; they are made.... What the State really punishes in a criminal is often its own neglect, its own failure to do its duty to the citizen.

It is curious to be treated by the old-fashioned people as a criminal because my thoughts and ways are beyond them.