Paragon Of Virtue Quotes

What a paragon of virtue you are, gunslinger!" the man in black laughed.

Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.

Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors—doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it. And on the other hand, you got people like Ligur and Hastur, who took such a dark delight in unpleasantness you might even have mistaken them for human.

The idea behind verses about the sealing of hearts appears to be the psychological law that if a person once does a good or an evil deed, his chances of repeating that kind of action increase and of doing its opposite proportionately decrease. With constant repetition of an evil or of a good action, it becomes almost impossible for a person to do the opposite, or even to think of it, so much so that while men's hearts become "sealed" and their eyes "blinded" if they do evil, their doing good produces such a state of mind that the devil himself can have no sway over it. Nevertheless, actions which create a psychological habit, however strong their influence may be, must not be construed as absolute determinants, for there is no "point of no return" for human behavior: genuine repentance (tauba) can turn an apparently wholly evil man into a paragon of virtue; on the other hand, although this is much more rare, an apparent paragon of virtue (even a prophet!) can turn into a near devil enmeshed in carnal pleasures .

Reputation never has very much to do with reality. I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you'd walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air. Chrisjen Avasarala

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Don’t think that writing your character as an untainted paragon of virtue will make them likeable—actually the opposite is true. People are attracted to each other’s rough edges. Your readers will relate more with your hero if they show issues that taint their character.

   'Not all women have the failings that I must have had, given that I have not succeeded in tying you to me,' she said, and added, with a sigh, 'or else not all husbands are like you.'    'Wives...false, jealous, domineering, flirtatious, or devout...husbands, wicked, inconstant, cruel or despotic: that in a nutshell is how all individuals on earth are, Madame; do not expect to find any paragons of virtue.'   

We can very easily see how parents in other cultures simply repeat cultural norms to their children as if those cultural norms were objective truth. Japanese parents teach their children obedience and filial piety; Catholic parents teach their children to drink the blood of their god; Muslim parents teach their children that a man who married a six-year-old girl – and consummated that marriage when she was nine – is the paragon of moral virtue; Western parents teach their children that democracy is the highest ideal; North Korean parents teach their children that the dictator who rules their lives is a sort of secular deity who loves them. The list goes on and on. Virtually every parent in the world believes that she is teaching her child the truth, when she is merely inflicting what may be politely called cultural mythologies on her child. We lie to our children, all the while telling them that lying is wrong. We command our children to think for themselves, all the while repeating the most prejudicial absurdities as if they were objective facts. We tell our children to be good, but we have no idea what goodness really is. We tell our children that conformity is wrong (“If everyone jumped off the Empire State building, would you jump too?”) but at the same time we are complete slaves to the historical inertia of prior prejudices.

The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm-I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seem a woman hide the dulness of a stupid husband or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth. A good housewife is of necessity a humbug.

Her mind, shaped so long before my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the behaviour of the girls of the little gang along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, tamed and subdued by good manners, by respect for intellectual values, the energy and charm of a cruel little girl from one of the noble families around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses, sadistically tormented cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, while remaining a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been, some years back now, and so much did she share his dashing style, the most glamorous mistress of the Prince de Sagan.

Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other.

The child cannot too early learn to be a good citizen? I think this is questionable: citizenship is an adult affair. Let school and home teach the child to respect the laws and institutions of his country. For the time being that should suffice. To use the juvenile novel or biography to turn the child into an internationalist or an advocate of racial tolerance may be high-minded, but I would suggest that the child first be allowed to turn into a boy or girl. Pious Little Rollo is dead; the Good Little Citizen is replacing him. The moralistic literature of the last century tried to produce small paragons of virtue. How about our urge to manufacture small paragons of social consciousness?

On the other hand, when we say someone acts like they “don’t owe anything to anybody,” we’re hardly describing that person as a paragon of virtue. In the secular world, morality consists largely of fulfilling our obligations to others, and we have a stubborn tendency to imagine those obligations as debts. Monks, perhaps, can avoid the dilemma by detaching themselves from the secular world entirely, but the rest of us appear condemned to live in a universe that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

She did not respond, only clung harder to my embrace, and I held her with all the afflictions of a man torn by love. What a miracle she was, what a truly exquisite paragon of beauty and virtue so incredibly combined. And all perhaps wrenched from my grasp because of a war I had no real interest in nor knowledge of. In that moment I did not care who won, if only it would end and I could be with her. I would accept the whole responsibility of defeat if I had to, if only it meant a life with her by my side. I just wanted her. Needed her. As simply and clearly as one needs food and oxygen and light, I needed her in my life. And above us, flittering tranquilly in the trees above, the finches and skylarks continued to sing peacefully into the fading sun.

Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads, you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you prefer? Plato’s Republic—one of the most influential works in the Western canon—is an extended argument that you should pick heads, for your own good. It is better to be than to seem virtuous.

What followed was the largest and most rapid privatisation ever seen in any country in the world (except perhaps in the Soviet Union under Yeltsin). Never in the history of civilisation has a state's total assets and infrastructure been disposed of so rapidly and in such a criminal fashion. Its machinations make Al Capone look like a paragon of capitalist virtue.

Enter Justine Putet, of whom it is now time to speak. Imagine a swarthy-looking, ill-tempered person, dried-up and of viperish disposition, with a bad complexion, an evil expression, a cruel tongue, defective internal economy, and (over all this) a layer of aggressive piety and loathsome suavity of speech. A paragon of virtue of a kind that filled you with dismay, for virtue in such a guise as this is detestable to behold, and in this instance it seemed to be inspired by a spirit of hatred and vengeance rather than by ordinary feelings of kindness. An energetic user of rosaries, a fervent petitioner at her prayers, but also an unbridled sower of calumny and clandestine panic. In a word, she was the scorpion of Clochemerle, but a scorpion disguised as a woman of genuine piety.

I knew it was my duty to my own legend to survive this trial. But I was still crippled by my own devices. Imagine me as a great fully-rigged man-of-war. Four masts, great bulwarks of oak and five score cannon. All my life I have sailed smooth seas and waters that parted for me by virtue of my own splendor. Never tested. Never riled. A tragic existence, if ever there was one. “But at long last: a storm! And when I met it I found my hull . . . rotten. My planks leaking brine, my cannon brittle, powder wet. I foundered upon the storm. Upon you, Darrow of Lykos.” He sighs. “And it was my own fault.” I war between wanting to punch him in the mouth and surrendering into my curiosity by letting him continue. He’s a strange man with a seductive presence. Even as an enemy, his flamboyance fascinated me. Purple capes in battle. A horned Minotaur helmet. Trumpets blaring to signal his advance, as if welcoming all challengers. He even broadcast opera as his men bombarded cities. After so much isolation, he’s delighting in imposing his narrative upon us. “My peril is thus: I am, and always have been, a man of great tastes. In a world replete with temptation, I found my spirit wayward and easy to distract. The idea of prison, that naked, metal world, crushed me. The first year, I was tormented. But then I remembered the voice of a fallen angel. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.’ I sought to make the deep not just my heaven, but my womb of rebirth. “I dissected the underlying mistakes which led to my incarceration and set upon an internal odyssey to remake myself. But—and you would know this, Reaper—long is the road up out of hell! I made arrangements for supplies. I toiled twenty hours a day. I reread the books of youth with the gravity of age. I perfected my body. My mind. Planks were replaced; new banks of cannon wrought in the fires of solitude. All for the next storm. “Now I see it is upon me and I sail before you the paragon of Apollonius au Valii-Rath. And I ask one question: for what purpose have you pulled me from the deep?” “Bloodyhell, did you memorize that?” Sevro mutters.

The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended - indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.

Oppenheimer, haunted by his leading role in the first use of atomic weapons, understood only one aspect of prudence. His longing not to do evil himself blinded him to the need to ward off the evil of others. This painfully knotted man hoped with one swipe of his moral sword to rid himself of the impossible tangle and to be clear and simple for once in his life. But being Oppenheimer could never be as easy as that. For Oppenheimer embodied two of the highest human types, the theoretical man described by Aristotle as god-like for living in the mind, among changeless truths, and the paragon of Machiavellian virtue, god-like in commanding the power of life and death over other men. No theoretical man before Oppenheimer had known such lordly power. In certain high moments he approached that Aristotelian theoretical purity which lives for the joys of knowing the world, whatever it might prove to be; in another light he thrilled at that Machiavellian power and its attendant renown; in contrary moods he reviled himself for the suffering he brought into the world, and ached to renounce his distinction and to be merely another man among men. Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one’s mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. Oppenheimer’s agony tore him open from top to bottom.

It is easy to be virtuous in our world because we have adopted easy virtues. We applaud ourselves for our goodness, but it costs nothing to be “good” in modern times. A man can be good just by sitting in his living room. The couch potato is the new paragon of virtue, exceeded in goodness only by the man in a coma. Virtue has been pulled down from its lofty perch and made accessible to the inert. By this standard, the most virtuous thing on the planet is a turnip or a blade of grass. It just sits there and says nothing and does nothing and does not get in the way. The church, once the stalwart defender of real virtues, now promotes cheap and shallow ones. Christians are not often exhorted to courage, chastity, fidelity, temperance, and modesty anymore. Those virtues require action and sacrifice and intention and thought and sometimes pain. They ask you to do something for their sake, become something, be something. These are the formidable, inconvenient virtues. You must rise to them because they will not come down to you. Luckily for us, we are no longer asked to strive for those high virtues. Instead we are encouraged to be welcoming, accepting, and tolerant. The turnip virtues. Compassionate, too. Always compassionate. And I agree, of course, that a Christian ought to be welcoming, accepting, and tolerant. Certainly he must be compassionate. But these virtues have superseded and ultimately consumed all the others.

Woman of Virtue She could be as still as a statue But unapologetically vibrant Even in her silence She exudes confidence Yet, so humble She runs her race with courage Because she has a clear picture Of where she is going She knows who she is And what she really wants She understands what her worth signifies Extremely dignified Many odds she defies Has influence that no one denies No matter where she goes, she prospers She makes life so much better Never doubts her own power She whose face shines brighter Such a paragon of splendour That recognizes God’s favour Committed to excellence Crowned with brilliance Clothed by abundance Cloaked in resilience Conquers through experience She is someone I look up to A woman of virtue

Darwin’s Bestiary PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel. 1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich. 2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn. 3. THE RABBIT a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent, but social as teacups: no hare is an island. (Moral: silence is golden—or anyway harmless; rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit, kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit. (Moral: to thine own self be true—or as true as you can; a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors, but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors. (Moral: to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles; to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d. Survival developed these small furry tutors; the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters. (Conclusion: you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.) 4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.

Colin. Just the name made Alessandro’s gut burn. He knew the man wanted his wife, even if Brianna was too blind to see it. The moron had been cuckolded by the paragon of supposed virtue, his wife Carrie and now he had finally opened his eyes and seen what Alessandro had known all along. Brianna put every other woman in New York to shame. No woman could come near her beauty, her passion, her fire. Colin had tossed her aside for the angelic Carrie and now he was changing his mind. Oh no you don’t, you miserable fucker. “Her friend indeed,” Bernardo drawled, his Italian accent thick with unmistakable implication. “Dat’s da truth. He no make her cry all da time.” That was directed at Alessandro, with small dark accusatory eyes. “He nice.” Alessandro couldn’t look at those eyes without feeling a sickening pang of guilt. She’s mine! He wanted to scream. Mine! Mine! Mine! “Oh yes. Very nice. He was very nice when he held her at the cemetery and very nice when he was dancing with her at Adresca.” That made Alessandro’s head lift in surprise. “Oh yes, my boy. She’s been there, cleaning up the rubble and word is that she’s working on re-opening it. Her friend Colin has been quite helpful in that endeavour.” “I don’ like how you say dat,” Will said scowling. “Really young William, I only speak the truth,” Bernardo taunted. Alessandro’s mind was racing. NO! Not Colin. He could not let that imbecile take Brianna away from him. He’d have to be eliminated somehow. Alessandro began to plot all the different ways he could ensure that Colin Neally stayed away from his wife, permanently. They all involved grisly, violent methods. He could not be allowed to win Brianna.

Don’t tell me you’re not a skeptic like I am and that you want to reach the marriage bed pure of heart and loins. That you’re an immaculate soul eagerly awaiting that magic moment when true love will lead you to the discovery of a joint ecstasy of flesh and inner being, blessed by the Holy Spirit, thus enabling you to populate the world with creatures who bear your family name and their mother’s eyes—that saintly woman, a paragon of virtue and modesty in whose company you will enter the doors of heaven under the benevolent gaze of the Baby Jesus.

Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people.

Not only was she the incarnation of Beauty itself, but she was also a paragon of virtue in both fidelity and love, participating in the divine as an ontological vessel keeping in harmony with all of creation like a well-tuned symphony.

For it is in passing that we achieve immortality. Through this, we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all. Infinite in distance and unbound by death, I release your soul, and by my shoulder, protect thee.

Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads, you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel. Tails, you will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would you prefer?

You’re a puppet master. You make unworthy, uninteresting, vapid people sound like paragons of virtue.” “I’m a writer and a successful one, and I’m sorry I can’t help you.

The refurbished Cromwell must be speaking to something in contemporary culture and the job of the adapters is to figure out what that something might be. They must do so knowing that whatever it is, it is not primarily about religion. The religious background is important in both versions: More’s relentless pursuit of heretics, Cromwell’s sympathy for, and manipulation of, Protestant reformers, the willingness of those reformers to support Anne because she is on their side, Henry’s genuine conviction that God is punishing his sin. But it matters as historical setting, not as contemporary passion. There is no religious shortcut to engagement with these dramas, no assumption that Catholics will hiss Cromwell and cheer More and that Protestants will do the opposite. Some other connection must be forged. What makes Mantel’s Cromwell appealing to readers, audiences, and TV viewers is that he is rather like most of them. He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood,

Barton, the Civil War battlefield heroine who founded the American Red Cross in 1881, zealously guarded her public image as a paragon of virtue, confiding darker emotions only in her diaries.

He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist—meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have? This terror

Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.” “Holden,

But when my ex opens the door, her somber expression and baggy sweats do not suggest we’re about to roll around naked. Nor does the toddler asleep on the bed behind her. I’m frozen as Janelle wraps her arms around me in a hug. “I’ve missed you,” she coos in a baby voice. I would not consider myself the paragon of virtue, but there’s no way I’m doing kinky shit with my ex while a kid sleeps a few feet away. I’ve never seen her baby before. When I found out Janelle’s new guy had knocked her up, I did my best to eradicate thoughts of her from my life. It was too painful to see her move on when she’d promised me that future. I only vaguely inquire about her through my cousin Bianca when I plan trips home so I can avoid my ex. As I take a good long look at the sleeping bundle, I stop breathing. Ernest has blond hair. And Janelle has light brown. My eyes are lasered on the kid, who has thick, black hair. Much like mine. Sweat breaks out on my body, and a giant lump forms in my throat. I cough. “What the fuck is going on?” Janelle wrings her hands, tears forming in her eyes. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Why I needed to do this in person. It’s long overdue.” But like all truly messed-up things in my life, I know the answer to my question before the words are out of her mouth. “She’s yours, Ben.” 3 BEN A suffocating, twisting blackness spreads through me as I stare at this woman I once loved.

I hate it that people think I did that." Avasarala nodded, then shrugged. "Reputation never has very much to do with reality," she said. "I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you'd walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air." "Holden," Prax said. "Well. He's the exception." she said.

Woman of Virtue She could be as still as a statue But unapologetically vibrant Even in her silence She exudes confidence Yet so humble She runs her race with courage Because she has a clear picture Of where she is going She knows who she is And what she wants She understands what her worth signifies Extremely dignified Many odds she defies She has influence that no one denies No matter where she goes, she prospers She makes life so much better Never doubts her own power She whose face shines brighter Such a paragon of splendour That recognises God’s favour Committed to excellence Crowned with brilliance Clothed by abundance Cloaked in resilience Conquers any turbulence She is someone I look up to A woman of virtue

It's not fair! I wanted to be the master halfling thrower!" Steve complained. Suddenly the air distorted and Steve was thrown over the wall, falling down the inner castle wall. Dave coughed and put a card down as there was a loud metal on stone impact. "I'm okay!" Steve yelled back up. "Seems like these floors are getting slippery," Lox commented. "Very slippery. One might fall once or twice on them," Gurren agreed. "Dave," Deia said with a low voice, looking to her husband, who looked like a paragon of virtue. "Those falls are dangerous," Dave said. "Yes, I hope they don't happen again," Deia said.

secondly, you tell them of the Redeemer. Tell your story in such a way that Jesus is the hero and not you; otherwise, you’ll teach your kids that they’re supposed to be the future heroes of their own stories. That means you don’t tell them stories to “scare them straight” based on the things that happened to you. Nor do you spin modern parables and cautionary tales that end with a moralistic lesson: “Don’t be like me when I was your age.” The only reason you’re willing to delve into your past is to show how you’ve needed a God who rescues sinners from the false worship to which they’ve enslaved themselves. That’s the real story of Scripture. It’s not about human paragons of virtue who triumph or case studies of villains that meet bad ends. It’s about a righteous, redeeming God who breaks into his people’s lives, against all odds, in order to rescue them and restore what they’ve broken.

Women are not paragons of virtue who cannot commit murder. Nor are they always insane when they do deliberately cause death. And the women with ‘blood on their hands’ are not homogenous.

Having said all this, I should also make it clear that Sri Ramana himself readily admitted that enlightenment didn’t turn people into paragons of virtue. Like most great Masters before him, he said that it was impossible to judge whether someone was enlightened by what he or she did or said. (‘One should not be deceived by the external appearance of a jnani.’) Saintliness does not necessarily go hand in hand with enlightenment, although most people like to think that it should. Sri Ramana was a rare conjunction of saintliness and enlightenment, but many other Masters and enlightened beings were not. They were not less enlightened because they didn’t conform to the social and ethical mores of their times, they simply had different destinies to fulfil.

It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other folks we can deem freaks. Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money? Your media experience is designed to nurture and protect your ego. So we show you the biggest losers we can find. It’s the underlying principle of almost every successful entertainment product we’ve had, from COPS to Freakshow to, literally, The Biggest Loser. We’re probably just a few years way from a show called What Would You Suck For a Dollar?

Seeking more information, I walked through the market listening to the gossip and discovered that our new general, the man sent to quell the unrest in the east, was the second son of a provincial tax collector whose only claims to recognition were that he had commanded some legions in Britain in the heady, early days of the invasion, that his brother had once stood for consul, and that he had been a governor in some African province, where the locals had thrown turnips at him. Despairing, I returned to the house, and that despair deepened later when Horgias came home with the news that our new paragon of martial virtue had until recently been hiding in Greece, in disgrace for having fallen asleep during one of Nero’s recitals in the theatre.