Word: virtuous
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...true that from the beginning colonial leaders had hoped that settlers would be both virtuous and religious. Earliest migrants to Virginia may have had commerce chiefly in mind-one cleric called them "miserable covetous men"-but they also tried to "serve and fear God, the Giver of all goodness." New England's mentors wanted to fill the northern colonies with "visible saints." In the middle colonies the founders of Pennsylvania called theirs a "holy experiment...
Thus it is not possible to say that in practice the people of the 1770s were more virtuous than we. No one knows how to measure morality with precision; historians have no evidence that the human raw material has changed since, say, the Stone Age. It is none the less true that the founding generation had certain values and advantages we lack today...
...unhappy past in Boston and to the men to whom she was more devoted than they to her. The two cops' dogged pursuit--through what can only be termed a grim and desparate picture of urban civilization, and countless discotheques besides--nets them a grimy handful of none-too-virtuous witnesses who would just as well cast all blame on the suspect, Jimmy Johnson. A man who, it seems, has already been chewed off and spit out by this world, Johnson is ritually pronounced Guilty by his peers and shuffled off to life-long incarceration...
...however, is like a case of aggravated assault, so eager, so desperate is it to be funny. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt) manages action briskly enough, but the script remains intractable. It was written by the authors of Pillow Talk and offers the same sort of antique situation comedy: a virtuous woman flirts with immorality and emerges unsullied and, indeed, victorious. Achieving this happy result requires some odd fancy-stepping. Pete, knowing that his wife had tried to be a whore (but not knowing, as the audience does, that she had been unsuccessful at it), forgives her by giving...
What I am suggesting is that, with wide variation among departments and institutions, the abstract principles of the editorial, like other virtuous declarations, may be self-defeating...