What's the difference between piety and sanctimony?

Piety


Definition:

  • (n.) Veneration or reverence of the Supreme Being, and love of his character; loving obedience to the will of God, and earnest devotion to his service.
  • (n.) Duty; dutifulness; filial reverence and devotion; affectionate reverence and service shown toward parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse.
  • (2) The Chinese attitude is explained in part by well-known features of traditional Chinese culture, such as filial piety and familism.
  • (3) For many of his generation, the growing of long beards and women wearing face veils is as much a sign of a higher economic status achieved from working abroad as piety.
  • (4) The summit declaration contained the usual pieties about "solidarity" between the Brics and their "shared goals".
  • (5) He had gone to religious school as a kid in Kuwait, and as the war closed in on Aleppo in 2012 he sought refuge in Islamic piety (though he could not bring himself to give up booze or cigarettes).
  • (6) The pastoral address ignored the culture wars and instead veered between piety, homespun advice and laughs – including a line about mothers-in-law.
  • (7) With Clegg and Cameron threatening to colonise Blair-style a huge share of the political spectrum, can anyone come up with something more convincing than either one last New Labour heave or the usual leftist pieties?
  • (8) Several of the young people she interviewed saw filial piety as a basic requirement in a spouse .
  • (9) We conjecture that for highly religious women modernising factors raise the risk and temptation in women’s environments that imperil their reputation for modesty: veiling would then be a strategic response, a form either of commitment to prevent the breach of religious norms or of signalling women’s piety to their communities.
  • (10) As the family-kinship system of Korean immigrants changes toward the conjugal family, it is contended that their traditional expectation of filial piety should be modified.
  • (11) Our findings have important implications for cultural policy and Muslim integration in Europe as if the option of wearing a veil is taken away from Muslim women, they fall on costlier ways of proving their piety,” said Aksoy, a postdoctoral research fellow from the department of sociology at the University of Oxford.
  • (12) But almost all of them emphasised the relationship with their natural family and very traditional values such as filial piety."
  • (13) For over a week the same social impulses of anti-corruption, populism, and religious piety that led to the revolution have been on the streets available to anyone who wanted to report on them.
  • (14) They see ostensibly positive changes: increased piety, greater obedience, and dissociation from troublesome acquaintances.
  • (15) Attempts to force Muslim women to stop wearing the veil might, therefore, be counterproductive by depriving them of the choice and opportunity to integrate: if women cannot signal their piety through wearing a veil, they might choose or be forced to stay at home, concludes the study, published in the Oxford University Press’s European Social Review .
  • (16) Most of this speech could be made by any party – same pieties, same promises to protect the vulnerable, promote enterprise and return Britain to greatness.
  • (17) But the show comes together with a series of interlinked sketches questioning media manipulation and making hay of race and PC pieties.
  • (18) After 1989 and the fall of the wall, neo-Nazism became a conduit for rage against the pieties – and the perceived humiliations and betrayals – of the newly unified Federal Republic of Germany.
  • (19) It is easy to win a Twitter war with humour and the ability to punch a hole in pomposity and piety.
  • (20) He has the same tendency to piety, a similar style of speechifying, and the same habit of briefly acknowledging that a given issue is more complex than he himself sometimes seems to think, before making everything sound blissfully simple.

Sanctimony


Definition:

  • (n.) Holiness; devoutness; scrupulous austerity; sanctity; especially, outward or artificial saintliness; assumed or pretended holiness; hypocritical devoutness.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) She provides a strong contrast to her sanctimonious, humourless sister Mary, who spouts empty platitudes about acceptable female conduct.
  • (2) It's not just on Fox News, but now also on MSNBC, where speaking critically of a military official, even in the mildest of tones, is treated like it's some sort of grave crime against the state: one that results in sanctimonious outbursts, manipulative appeals to patriotism, and the casting of the offender out of decent company.
  • (3) But Cruz’s aura of smug sanctimony, like his lack of humility, is striking even in an age of Trumpery.
  • (4) Here's a chocolate tart to really enjoy – not sanctimoniously dark or unpalatably bitter – just smooth, malty and rich.
  • (5) Suzuki admitted to journalists he called Trudeau a twerp, and the Liberal leader dismissed his critique of the party’s climate policy as “sanctimonious crap”.
  • (6) However, he also said it was important “not to feel too sanctimonious”, adding that he believed intelligence officials responsible for torturing detainees were working during a period of extraordinary stress and fear.
  • (7) My sanctimonious two cents: We all do stupid things and saying sorry when you’re in the wrong is always a good thing, but the monotonous regularity with which Pardew gets himself in scrapes with rival managers, officials and - now - opposition players tends to render his post match apologies rather hollow.
  • (8) Hockey said he wasn't interested in "sanctimonious lectures" from a prime minister who had "called me a fat man in parliament" and who had on Tuesday branded him and his colleagues "effectively, misogynist pigs".
  • (9) As this report is a sanctimony-free zone, we'll not be going into the rights and wrongs of last night's game here, but whichever side of the argument you stand, you have got to admit: that is one hell of a quote .
  • (10) Certainly, there are those of us who have begun to regard Tumour Neck Man as an old friend, a fellow sinner in a world full of sanctimonious bores.
  • (11) I had no responsibility for, or interest in, the sanctimony of other news organisations.
  • (12) Despite the government's sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended.
  • (13) One says that this is a mere smokescreen of sanctimony meant to hide a retreat from a market Google was unable to conquer for business reasons … The other is that this is a true act of moral bravery," said Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on the internet.
  • (14) It will be the British at their worst: sanctimonious, self-congratulatory, worshipping at the tomb of the unknown, awful German.
  • (15) For those who believe the Liberal Democrats can sometimes veer between the sanctimonious and the eccentric, all this will seem further confirmation of the party's fundamental unfitness to govern.
  • (16) It will just turn you in to a self-deluding, sanctimonious bore.
  • (17) There are reasons for not clambering on to the soap boxes of sanctimony too swiftly.
  • (18) Look, at the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I think the BBC is there to do good.
  • (19) I could be a critical friend of the coalition.” While his party was in government, Farron voted against the tuition fee rise and the bedroom tax, provoking a senior party member to confide to a reporter, “Which bit of the sanctimonious, God-bothering, treacherous little shit is there not to like?” Just weeks before this year’s election, he scandalised colleagues by scoring his party’s handling of coalition politics a headline-catching two out of 10.
  • (20) Johnson said the BBC’s more niche public service programmes “go on to BBC4 where quite often you can’t measure the audience but they fulfil their remit and they can argue when they go on their sanctimonious missions about justifying £4bn [in licence fee income], ‘Well of course, we do all these obscure programmes that no one watched.’ “They put them on a slot where no one was ever going to watch them.” On the licence fee, Johnson told the committee: “I challenge you to find a more regressive system in terms of who gets the best value from it.

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