"In everyday life, acting virtuously means such boring things as being kind, honest and dutiful."

"For moral prodigies, such pedestrian examples are beneath notice. Rousseau, 'drunk with virtue' as he put it in his 'Confessions,' nonetheless shipped off to a foundlings home all five of the children he had with his semi-literate mistress. She protested, but Rousseau cared not for he had 'never felt the least glimmering of love for her.' Robespierre floated aloft upon a similarly callous intoxication. The Republic, he said, was founded on 'virtue and its emanation, terror.' Hence the work of the Committee of Public Safety, whose chief handmaiden was the guillotine and whose activities depended critically on anonymous reports about those whose commitment to virtue was less than wholehearted. Yale, though sitting on a tax-exempt endowment of $24 billion, does not have the guillotine...."

From "The College Formerly Known as Yale/Any renaming push on the Ivy campus should start at the top—with Elihu Yale, slave trader extraordinaire," by Roger Kimball, on the occasion of the creation of Yale's "Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming." It's in the Wall Street Journal, so you may have to Google some text to get a link that will work for you.