Definition of "self-restraining" []

• Used of nonindulgent persons (adjective)

WordNet. Princeton University. 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."
• "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."
• "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."