Subjectivity

Will any private training enable the young man to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be carried away by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have? No, indeed, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly; such is inevitably the character of one who has had no other training in virtue other than that which is supplied by public opinion. (I speak of human virtue only; what is more than human is not included: for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God.)

I might compare him to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him – he would learn how to approach and handle it, also at what times and from what causes it is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of its different cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, it is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon it, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means, but calls this honorable and that dishonorable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights, and evil to be that which it dislikes; and he can give no other account of them except that the just and noble are the necessary.

Consider further: will the world ever be induced to believe in the existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many beautiful, or of the absolute in each kind rather than of the many in each kind? Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher. And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of the world.

—Plato, Republic, Book 5.

Coddled

"The youth is an intellectual merely, a believer in ideas, who thinks that ideas can overcome the world. The mature man passes beyond intellectuality to wisdom; he believes in ideas, too, but life has taught him to be content to see them embodied, which is to see them under a sort of limitation. It has been mentioned that the spoiled-child psychology is encountered almost solely in those people who have abandoned nature and who have signalized this abandonment by taking flight from country to city. Turn where we will, we find that the countryman has a superior philosophic resignation to the order of things. He is less agitated by the cycle of birth and death; he frets less; he is more stable in time of crisis."

—Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences chapter 9.

Basically, experience should teach idealists to respect the constraints imposed by limited resources and human nature. The people who believe they can and should be insulated (by government) from everything-they-don't-like tend to live in cities, because in cities they are insulated to some extent. The problem comes when they try to impose their ideals on the real world, or when the real world invades their city.

“Serious” novels

Novels and poems and plays of the late century smelled of the faculty lounge. “Serious” novels were still read by people who thought themselves better educated than their fellows. Meanwhile, almost all of what [most] people did read was unrelievedly banal: romance novels put out by formula, suspense novels with clipped or infantile sentences, and weird fantasy novels trying desperately to echo J. R. R. Tolkien.

—Anthony Esolen

Welfare

If communities are going to overcome poverty, soaring out-of-wedlock birth rates, and high incarceration rates, the change has to come from within those communities themselves. People need to take responsibility for their lives instead of relying on the next government program to bail them out. Real solutions have to come from inside, via the long, hard work of changing community standards and morals. Extracting handouts from the government has done little to aid poor communities and everything to aid the people channeling the handouts. These communities are being exploited by their supposed advocates, and many of the advocates know it. 

If a child growing up in these conditions is not taught to take responsibility for his own life, to claim his life as his own, to work to live a better, more productive life than those he grew up observing, then he risks falling into that same rudderless existence. That failure to take personal responsibility for one’s fate, I theorized, is the enemy within.

—from Late Admissions by Glenn Loury, chapter 11.

Man's power over Nature

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument [or excuse].

―C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Scarcity

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

—Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? and Other Essays

The Insatiable Soul

What moves each soul is different, but the soul is the same—this restive and insatiable soul that despises all goods of the world and which, nonetheless, incessantly needs to be stirred in order to seize them, so as to escape the grievous numbness that is experienced as soon as it relies for a moment on itself. This is a sad story. It is a little bit the story of all men, but of some more than others, and of myself more than anyone I know.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 148–149.

Intellectual Proletariat

There are few greater dangers to political stability than than the existence of an intellectual proletariat who find no outlet for their learning [other than politics].

—F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

The Shadow

I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.

— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

Natural uniformity

Where the differences among people are least-in the desire to be safe from violence and secure in their possessions, for example-there is less sacrifice of freedom in assigning to a monopoly the power to punish [exceptions]. Were the same monopoly to determine the 'best' size(s) or style(s) of shoes, the result would be mass discomfort, and were it to determine more and weightier matters the results would be even less satisfactory in terms of the differing values of individuals, however 'better' it might be in terms of the particular values of the monopoly. 

 —Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions