The greatest of human satisfactions are those which root a person to his own time and place. It matters that objectives can be attained. It is also important that they can be shared: a purely personal pleasure can have no great depth. But attainment should not be easy; there is no real satisfaction in doing something which comes easily. The deepest satisfaction comes from those things which require hard work and the development of technique. Risk is also important; no achievement or possession is of much value unless it required risk in the attainment. Winning is of no value unless you might have lost. ‘Taking things for granted’ is perhaps the commonest mistake that people make about their own interests. They assume that what they already have is guaranteed and, therefore, trivial and become obsessed with what they lack, by the next stage in their plan for their own development. Most people, most of the time, are not satisfied with life: they pine for something extra. ‘If only I could have . . . a wife, promotion, a new car, my own house, a son . . . ’: this is the commonest way in which people think about their interests.

(Lincoln Allison, Right Principles: A Conservative Philosophy of Politics [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984], 168)