(n.) A breaker or destroyer of images or idols; a determined enemy of idol worship.
(n.) One who exposes or destroys impositions or shams; one who attacks cherished beliefs; a radical.
Example Sentences:
(1) Banks, who made his money selling insurance and sees himself, like Nigel Farage, as an ex-public school iconoclast of the “liberal establishment”, is no longer just some rightwing outlier.
(2) In its infancy, the movement against censorship agitated on behalf of artists, iconoclasts, talented blasphemers; against repressive forces whose unpleasantness only confirmed which side was in the right.
(3) Described by Econsultancy as “erudite and iconoclastic”, he was recognised as tech entrepreneur of the year at the 2016 UK Business Awards.
(4) Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as "New Labour", which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, he was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour's increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.
(5) On Friday in St Petersburg, Florida, the legendary pro-wrestler, whose real name is Terry Bollea, delivered a $115m legal hit on the iconoclastic web publisher, a victory that signals a significant change in the public’s tolerance for media invasions of privacy – and that could bankrupt the site.
(6) This autumn’s project should deliver sparks as Khan creates and performs a duet with flamenco iconoclast Galván, exploring their fascination with rhythm, gesture, pattern and myth.
(7) I am something of a parvenu, but we should welcome the iconoclastic and the unconventional.
(8) Acknowledging the contribution of sociology and social sciences to psychiatry, it is suggested that the heroic period of social psychiatry and the iconoclastic approach of sociology of mental health are over.
(9) On the surface, the grumpy pacifist iconoclast had little in common with the war hero author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom - apart from a weakness for inordinately long prefaces.
(10) In some ways no one represents this better than the iconoclastic Varoufakis, whose investiture should go down as a textbook case of what happens when radicals come into town.
(11) While Brand’s iconoclastic politics, urging people not to vote and to abandon conventional party politics, emerge naturally from his subversive comedy, the spirit of Izzard’s surreal improvisations are harder to find in his pursuit of a conventional political career.
(12) The recent case of The Jewel of Medina, a work by Sherry Jones which is neither bold nor iconoclastic, exemplifies the problem.
(13) In his 20s he was an iconoclastic aesthete, who learned Chinese with the great Swedish sinologist, Bernard Karlgren, in Stockholm, not out of political commitment to Mao's recent revolution, but out of love for a venerable culture of grace and simplicity which, he thought, represented the blissful antithesis of the consumerist west.
(14) This iconoclastic critique from the right did not change US policy but gained the keepers of Rand's flame respect and credibility, said Ghate, a Canadian of German and Indian parentage with a PhD in philosophy.
(15) Outraged Gehry's iconoclastic designs include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Maggie's Centre, a cancer daycare centre, in Dundee.
(16) The impresario and iconoclast Malcolm McLaren , who has died aged 64 from the cancer mesothelioma, was one of the pivotal, yet most divisive influences on the styles and sounds of late 20th-century popular culture.
(17) His backers, it should be noted, include such bold iconoclasts as Tessa Jowell, Lord Falconer and Alastair Campbell.
(18) If Christopher was louche, hedonistic and iconoclastic, Hitchens would be fastidious, puritanical and Christian.
(19) But Brolin said that “he came on [set] as the kind of mercurial iconoclast he is.
(20) These iconoclasts would happily leave behind the burden of ancient stones and get on with the church’s real mission.
Philistine
Definition:
(n.) A native or an inhabitant of ancient Philistia, a coast region of southern Palestine.
(n.) A bailiff.
(n.) A person deficient in liberal culture and refinement; one without appreciation of the nobler aspirations and sentiments of humanity; one whose scope is limited to selfish and material interests.
(a.) Of or pertaining to the Philistines.
(a.) Uncultured; commonplace.
Example Sentences:
(1) But then, if centuries of privileged breeding and education produce dunderheads and philistines, that proves talent is genetically random, not inherited.
(2) The Gurlitt hoard is a survival of the Nazis' strange and ambivalent attitude to art, from Hitler's aesthetic New Order to the simple philistine greed that probably motivated most of their art theft.
(3) They said it was suicide and, yes, Abbas had had these thoughts in Fara' Philistine – we used that as leverage to push William Hague into action – but there is no way he would have done that.
(4) Yet there is no chance of either main party delivering the coup de grace, given the furious outcry and accusations of philistinism that would ensue.
(5) A lament for the failed ideals of a group of 1960s Cambridge graduates who all too quickly swap their literary dreams for coffee table books and hack journalism, the play was an elegiac threnody for soiled friendship and a descent from intellectual rigour and seriousness to philistinism.
(6) But saying anything is fine if it sells well seems philistine.
(7) In this two-hour near-monologue Bates played the fallen actor-hero forever ranting about being forced to work on tiny stages for lousy wages in front of philistines.
(8) Her review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, in Harper's magazine, accuses him of, among other things, philistinism: "He has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry."
(9) Unlike many disputes between labels and artists, the argument between Berry Gordy Jr and his brother-in-law Marvin Gaye over What's Going On doesn't easily reduce to philistine versus visionary.
(10) It's her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance.
(11) (10) Including the Rich Kids, Hot Club, Dead Men Walking, the Flying Padovanis, Slinky Vagabond, the Mavericks, the Philistines and, most recently, International Swingers .
(12) "Proper" here works as a strategy to avoid seeming privileged, while at the same time tuning in cunningly to anti-intellectual prejudice (what is "proper" is not over-thought) – all as Cameron conducts, like some kind of over-moisturised Visigoth, his philistine economic campaign against the BBC, universities ("proper education"), and the National Health Service ("proper healthcare").
(13) But the self-congratulatory philistinism of this year's panel has done a disservice to the writers they selected, the writers they didn't, and the readers who are thought to be so superficial that all you need to do is convince them that a book will "zip along" faster than an episode of Downton .
(14) Now Nicolas Sarkozy wants to answer the critics who call him a cultural philistine by plunging into his new love for architecture and creating a Greater Paris that would be world's most environmentally friendly and boldly designed metropolis.
(15) You are not only about to make philistines of yourselves, but philistines of us all."
(16) The whipping he received over The Corrections was his first experience of being publicly reviled, and he blames it on the prevailing mood of philistinism.
(17) Pellerin reflects the general trend across an increasingly philistine west, but it’s not the philistinism that I’m so much worried about.
(18) But what he called "the fight against bad English" is too often understood, thanks to the perversities of his own example, as a philistine and joyless campaign in favour of that shibboleth of dull pedants "plain English".
(19) Gambling away his savings, Grant – a "clever bloke" who thinks he can only be happy in English exile – becomes trapped among the kind of chauvinistic, philistine drunkards he affects to despise, yet slowly he begins to emulate them.
(20) MK’s defenders argue that such philistinism threatens a modern masterpiece which deserves to be recognised as a world heritage site.