Public order is a fragile thing, and if you don't fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.

[in 1998] 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.

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 aren't any liberals left in New York. They've all been mugged by now.

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control and duty.

Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.