So a pope who was a member of the Hitler Youth and who served in the Wehrmacht asks us to take his word for it that the predecessor who sealed a concordat with Hitler was a coruscating example of virtue.
And I say this background story because he was my example of not selling out; he was my example of virtue and character.
His books avoided the clutter of abstruse facts and sparkled with piquant examples of human virtues and foibles.
Examples of perverted virtues would be the narcissist who shows how charitable he is, brandishing his generosity when giving money to the homeless.
For much of the 20th Century Western Europe and the United States have stood as examples of the virtues of democracy, universal human rights, and humanitarianism, but they have turned their backs on those principles for which they stood.
Outside of Book I, which is a kind of extended 'Acknowledgments' of the people who graced Marcus' life as examples of some virtue or bearers of some useful lesson, it is difficult to detect much structure in the work, for instance whether the order of the books and chapters is significant, or even whether the chapter divisions reflect breaks in Marcus' thought.
In his debut as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Carson told agency employees about the virtues of the "can-do" American society and used "immigrants" who "came here in the bottom of slave ships" as the examples of that virtue.
If the fables of Jean de La Fontaine are among France's greatest cultural treasures, forming the minds of countless children, Mr. Hollande is a fine example of the virtues of the tortoise, not the hare; the ant, not the grasshopper.
