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

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

The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise - and occasionally the application - of the view that all people, and not just one's own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims

[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.

Crime is the price society pays for abandoning character.

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.