Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (Touchstone 1997), p. 3:

Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the perennial challenge: to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age.