self-restraining

He believed people either regulated themselves or disaster would do the job for them.3 Although he never traveled this far east, the British reverend identified China as the prime example of a population incapable of the self-restraining “preventative checks” that “civilised nations” like Britain were able to apply through religion and education.

When a Billion Chinese Jump Jonathan Watts 2010

He believed people either regulated themselves or disaster would do the job for them.3 Although he never traveled this far east, the British reverend identified China as the prime example of a population incapable of the self-restraining “preventative checks” that “civilised nations” like Britain were able to apply through religion and education.

When a Billion Chinese Jump Jonathan Watts 2010

He believed people either regulated themselves or disaster would do the job for them.3 Although he never traveled this far east, the British reverend identified China as the prime example of a population incapable of the self-restraining “preventative checks” that “civilised nations” like Britain were able to apply through religion and education.

When a Billion Chinese Jump Jonathan Watts 2010

Military-industrial capitalism, with its arrogant disregard for the human and environmental consequences of its activities, can have only a limited run on Planet Earth, but it doesn't know this and has no inner, self-restraining mechanism.

Robert Koehler: Implications of a Pointless War 2010

Other equity feminists are socially conservative and argue that, while the state should not enforce them, traditional values function as bulwarks against state power and produce independent and self-restraining citizens.

Liberal Feminism Baehr, Amy R. 2007

Malthus said, some people are more prudent, productive and self-restraining than others.

Malthus on population, with contempt 2006

So all that the islands do, by having higher prices, is keep out riff-raff, and by having enforced rules, do the self-restraining that people aren't discliplined themselves to have.

Civicus 2006

Yes, it's true the founding fathers were wealthy and educated, and thus not representative of the majority, but without that wealth they would not have been able to pull a bunch of oppressed colonies into a new nation, and without that education they would not have been able to draw upon enlightenment-era social philosophy as a basis to attempt to formulate a self-restraining government beholden to its constitutents for its authority.

When ideology and reality meet, and ideology gets bitch-slapped. CC 2005

This playfulness flourishes when the ghosts of male violence that haunt the scene have been confined within the oak of masculine self-restraining strength.

Wordsworth's 'The Haunted Tree' and the Sexual Politics of Landscape 2001

The real alternative to total control is not minimal control or, even worse, the absence of any self-restraint, but public self-control that is derived from some internalized and self-restraining notions as to what is appropriate and what is not.

Out of Control Zbigniew Brzezinski 1993