Famous quotes containing the words virtue and/or system:
“The hour when you say, “What does my virtue matter? It has not yet made me rage. How tired I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency!””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)