This is all very much in the spirit of Rossellini, who felt that technical perfection was a minor virtue compared to the warmth and spontaneity that could be captured once technique was thrown away.
It's odd to have to call attention to this minor virtue, since it's a baseline quality of cinematic ethics — but it makes for a significant and dismaying contrast with the grandly catastrophic set piece that bookends it, near the end of the film, in which En Sabah Nur, a.k.a. the eponymous Apocalypse himself, does his best to apocalyze the world, with particular attention to New York.
In decline, their minor virtues come into focus: people spend less time telling you how fortunate you are to be there.
We have to take a radical position with regard to American literature, admit its minor virtues and announce that it lacks necessity and point out its immense shortcomings".
Paragons of the minor virtues have not always made very good Presidents: the uxorious Ford, for instance, and still poorer Jimmy Carter, doggedly holding his scrawny sexagenarian wife's hand on this or that ineptly-managed international occasion.
That's one of the minor virtues of the part live-action, part animated feature "Osmosis Jones Laurence Fishburnene of "The Matrix" gives voice to Thrax, the evil virus fighting to the literally feverish finish with Osmosis Jones (the voice of Chris Rock), the white-blood-cell cop charged with keeping his host's body healthy.
Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the life of the Sage; but whether his possession of the minor virtues be actual as well as potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to qualities higher still, must be decided afresh in each several case.
Like many great novelists, Bennett wrote a number of mediocre books, and if you start with the wrong one ('&apos Hilda Lessways,'' say, or '&apos The Pretty Lady,'' or '&apos The Grand Babylon Hotel'' or even '&apos Buried Alive,'' though these each have their minor virtues), you might well wonder what all my fuss is about.
Perhaps Rand thinks that they are "minor" virtues because all the conditions for exercising them are only sometimes met.
A deeper reason for her relegation of kindness etc. to the status of minor virtues, however, might be her conception of people as essentially agents rather than patients, doers rather than receivers, self-sufficient rather than dependent.
On the scale of iniquities and crudeness of which property development is capable, any chinks in Argent's virtue are minor stuff.
