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

Safetyism

Suppose that X percent of the children will receive serious injuries if they play in this particular playground and 2X percent will receive equally serious injuries if they stay home. Since no place is 100 percent safe, and none can be made 100 percent safe, the only meaningful question is the relative safety of one place compared to another and the cost of making either place safer by a given amount. Our natural inclination may be to want to make every place as safe as possible but in reality no one does that when they must pay the costs themselves. We are willing to pay for brakes in our cars, but having a second set of brakes in case the first set fails would make us safer still. 

A new kind of institution for transferring risk has arisen in recent times. Since government agencies such as the National Highway Safety Administration do not charge directly for their services as do mutual aid societies or insurance companies, they must collect the money needed to support themselves from lawsuits, donations, or taxes. Put differently, their only money-making product or service is fear—and their incentives are to induce as much fear as possible in jurors, legislators, and the general public. Whereas individuals weighing risks for themselves are restrained in how much risk reduction they will seek by the costs, there are no such restraints on the amount of risk reduction sought by those whose risk reduction is paid for with other people's money. Nor is there any such inherent restraint on how much fear they will generate from a given risk or how much credit they will claim for whatever risk reduction may take place, regardless of what the facts may be. 

—Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics.