When Texan Maines told that London audience that she was "ashamed" that Bush also hailed from the Lone Star State, she started a furor in country radio and industry circles, where patriotism is an exalted virtue and conservatism the most familiar political path.
I consider it reasonable to conclude, that they will as readily do their duty, as deviate from it: Nor do I go on the grounds mentioned by gentlemen on the other side--that we are to place unlimited confidence in them, and expect nothing but the most exalted integrity and sublime virtue.
By the time the curtain falls, to quote the Prince, "the papers are finally recovered, vice defeated and virtue exalted". The whole was enriched by "comic opera love" in which the mayor's ward, Carita, intent on marrying U.S. Navy Lt. Kingsley Haddon, resists her guardian's efforts to unite her with the unscrupulous count and aeronaut Pierre Bombilleaux.
Of exalted public and private virtue in his life and career, he filled up the full measure of our conception of a man".
The Roman historian Livy said of Cincinnatus that "it is worthwhile for those persons who despise all things human and who suppose that there is no room either for exalted honor, or for virtue, except where riches abound in great profusion, to listen to his story".
As Alexander Hamilton remarked in Federalist 75, "The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous...to the sole disposal of... a president of the United States".
The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States".
Astronomy, he tells us, is instructive not only by virtue of its exalted subject matter, but also because of its utility in the other sciences.
Since it won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, critics have extolled its virtues, giving it such exalted titles as "the new King Kong of crime movies". Faced with writing this review, and knowing Pulp Fiction to be by far the most-critically hyped movie in recent memory, the last thing I wanted to do was be the conformist and fall into step with every other review I had read.
Over time the big Champagne makers turned this necessity into a virtue, so much so that the exalted image of the blender's art long ago overtook any notion of terroir in Champagne.
To stand virtuously in the grandstand looking down upon a world whose best efforts in inevitably imperfect times can never match your own exalted standards is a definition of irrelevance, not virtue.
