There’s a whole generation growing up thinking…the government exists to care for them.

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.”Christ, did we,’ said Maureen. ‘So many lessons.’So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily’s every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many...

Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little.

Rumors run wild when one sacrifices for self and temporarily forsakes those who assume entitlement to one’s persona.

Narcissistic personality disorder is named for Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection. Freud used the term to describe persons who were self-absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist’s...

You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her...

Competition works best in sports, but humans get addicted to stuff.

When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.

You don’t build a family by tearing down another one.

Instead of communicating “I love you, so let me make life easy for you,” I decided that my message needed to be something more along these lines: “I love you. I believe in you. I...

Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.

A sense of entitlement is a cancerous thought process that is void of gratitude and can be deadly to our relationships.

In a fit of anger he had said to her, “You’ll always be miserable,” to which she thoughtfully replied, “Is that so? It’s impossible to be miserable when you’ve known tragedy and hardship. Both strengthen...

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for...

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Beware: It is a quick transition from a nourishing sense of gratitude to a poisonous sense of entitlement.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to...

Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is asacrament that should be taken kneeling.

The eye of true equality often seems to have some degree of disrespect for the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty to the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty, although in reality, it’s simply irrespectiveness.

Not one word was said by Moses or Aaron as to the wickedness of depriving a human being of his liberty. Not a word was said in favor of liberty. Not the slightest intimation that...

In Missoula, Grizzly football exists in a realm apart, where there is a pervasive sense of entitlement. University of Montana fans, coaches, players, and their lawyers expect, and often receive, special dispensation.

They throw rice at a new marriage, then give him beans in a divorcement.

I was in my early twenties and I was, to be quite honest, a bit of a punk. A swaggering entitled straight white guy who hadn’t but a lot of thought into what it might...

The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn’t owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed...

Those that much covet are with gain so fond,For what they have not, that which they possessThey scatter and unloose it from their bond,And so, by hoping more, they have but less;Or, gaining more, the...

Who are we to think we deserve anything? What makes us so great? No one is “lucky” to have us. We are all full of it.

If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.

Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right—creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.

It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being...

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.

They act as if their religion were a celestial gumball machine, taking no blame for personal failures because they won’t manifest their will in the real world by working for their goals.

I’m on a government watch list. But I’m not interested, because government watches only work twenty minutes out of every hour.

Grace destroys entitlement.

To avoid the cost incurred in pursuing great things we opt for ease and blithely abandon great things. The sheer recklessness of such a pathetically apathetic trade-off will eventually cost us a life squandered, which...

If you do not need something that it is still useful, give it to someone who will appreciate it before you douse it in lighter fluid in hopes Santa Odin will put a new one...

Making universal prosperity a right is the surest way to universal poverty.

Nice tits” to his mother? His sister? His daughter?) And although I should know better, I, too, equate my body with my soul and the result, at least sometimes, is a deep shame of both....

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.

Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can’t resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.

Hollywood-Nobody’s impressed by anybody because they’re all too consumed with trying to cover up their own shortcomings. Hollywood is a microcosm of a world of lazy moral ideals and social indifference where every man is...

He did not really understand the game they were playing: in his world, the best way to get something was to deserve it, not to toady to the giver.

pursuit”. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don’t do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a...

I thought maybe she’d whisk us off by magic, or at least hail a taxi. Instead, Bast borrowed a silver Lexus convertible.”Oh, yes,” she purred. “I like this one! Come along, children.””But this isn’t yours,”...