Virtue

"America’s founding documents presuppose that a limited government depends on a free and virtuous society. 'Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,' said George Washington in his Farewell Address." - Acton

"Virtue politics, following the ancient Greek philosophers, assumed that hierarchies would always exist in society, so that a principal task of politics was to ensure that those hierarchies would be just ones, based on real distinctions of merit between rulers and ruled." - The Public Discourse

"What Barr describes is a long-term shift from an understanding that a robust civil society, including religious institutions, could promote healthy norms such as sobriety and self-discipline to a belief that government could be relied upon for rehabilitation, the term emphasized by the Kennedy administration when it first authorized federal grants for social services." - National Review

"But in fact there are people whom God has deemed to call good because His salvation has made them good. His Word records a number of examples..." - GARBC

"The catalyst is a sprawling coalition of self-described nationalists, Catholic integralists, protectionists, economic planners, and others who are increasingly rallying around something called “post-liberal” conservativism. By “liberal,” they don’t mean contemporary progressivism as represented by the Democratic party. No, they mean classical liberalism, the Enlightenment worldview held by the Founding Fathers." - Jonah Goldberg

"Over the past 300 years, Western culture has overthrown its traditional understanding of virtue and replaced it with an ersatz morality. This revolution has allowed personally vile people to claim the loftiest moral standing while, in their daily lives, freely treating those around them with gross disrespect and abuse." American Conservative

"[I]f partisans endorse the unspoken but clear message 'We’ll always protect the unethical ones on our side,' it guarantees they’ll get more unethical behavior. They’re sending the signal to all aspiring leaders within their movement that they would rather live with bad behavior on their own side than give the other side a 'win.'" . . .

"Neither of these ideas is connected with any religious notion, much less any orthodox version of Christianity, in which pride is the sin of preferring a self-chosen world to a God-made world and where sin itself consists in rebellion against and alienation from God." AC