How to Use iconoclasm in a Sentence

iconoclasm

noun
  • Trump, this time, has chosen an outsider who shares his instinct for iconoclasm.
    — Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY, 13 Jan. 2025
  • Scholars have tried to place the centuries-old acts of iconoclasm in a broader context.
    — Supriya Gandhi, Foreign Affairs, 13 July 2020
  • There’s a thin line between possession and iconoclasm.
    — Brian Boucher, ARTnews.com, 16 Apr. 2026
  • He was closeted in high school and cultivated a rebel iconoclasm to cope.
    — Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, Daily Intelligencer, 21 Jan. 2018
  • Students and peers said such exercises were not iconoclasm or mere theatrics.
    — C.j. Chivers, New York Times, 21 Feb. 2023
  • But the burn-it-down iconoclasm of his base does not seem so consistent or easily mollified as that would imply.
    — The Economist, 15 Aug. 2019
  • The history of iconoclasm suggests that the result is more often bloodshed than reform.
    — Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 11 Oct. 2017
  • Slender and stooped, Ramin had a gentle manner that belied his ferocious iconoclasm.
    — New York Times, 10 Dec. 2021
  • Studio 54 has a history drenched in iconoclasm, and now, Valentino fragrances.
    — Essence, 12 Sep. 2025
  • And the personal iconoclasm and moral purity of the Sanders campaign didn’t lend themselves to governance.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times, 23 July 2016
  • For as long as humans have been making art, natural disasters, the ravages of time, theft and iconoclasm have threatened their creations’ survival.
    — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 Dec. 2022
  • And although both sides celebrate their free-thinking iconoclasm, loyalty is strictly enforced.
    — Robert Lynch, Chicago Tribune, 3 Apr. 2026
  • When oppressive regimes do collapse, the first thing people tend to do is topple the statues; this literal iconoclasm becomes an outlet for their relief and rage.
    — Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic, 8 Feb. 2026
  • That kind of wry iconoclasm marks Östlund, an artist at once of great anthropological seriousness and deep, class-clown silliness.
    — Steven Zeitchik, latimes.com, 23 Oct. 2017
  • Modern iconoclasm tends to the abolition of the fanciful and the merely aesthetical.
    — John Kelly, Washington Post, 30 Apr. 2018
  • But over the past decade Serra has been caught in the crossfire of the divisive iconoclasm overtaking American culture.
    — James Matthew Wilson, WSJ, 13 May 2021
  • Fashion’s instinctual reaction to moments like this one is to retract and revert to the tried-and-true, and few of Owens’s peers have his instincts for iconoclasm.
    — José Criales-Unzueta, Vogue, 25 Jan. 2024
  • The decision was both impetuous and brutal, in part an exercise in fundamentalist iconoclasm, in part an act of defiance and rage against the world at large.
    — Washington Post, 6 Jan. 2020
  • Over the course of human history, natural disasters, the ravages of time, theft and iconoclasm have destroyed countless masterpieces.
    — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 27 Dec. 2021
  • But the ambitions of the First Look Media empire have also been hobbled by Greenwald’s team-last iconoclasm.
    — Simon Van Zuylen-Wood, Daily Intelligencer, 21 Jan. 2018
  • How the Chinese language and its writing system have weathered the modern waves of iconoclasm and been renewed since the turn of the past century is the subject of Tsu’s book.
    — Ian Buruma, The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2022
  • But a mixture of iconoclasm, old-fashioned authority, and a willingness to express ambivalence, even at the risk of annoying people, has been part of her appeal from the start.
    — Christopher Tayler, Harper's Magazine, 18 Dec. 2023
  • Over its past decade, no leader of Signal has embodied that iconoclasm as visibly as Meredith Whittaker.
    — Andy Greenberg, WIRED, 28 Aug. 2024
  • Missing masterpieces For as long as humans have been making art, natural disasters, the ravages of time, theft and iconoclasm have threatened their creations’ survival.
    — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Dec. 2023
  • Missing masterpieces For as long as humans have been making art, natural disasters, the ravages of time, theft and iconoclasm have threatened their creations’ survival.
    — Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 27 Dec. 2024
  • Anyone who wants this campaign to retain a trace of Kempian iconoclasm — and be more than a dreary prelude to Newsom’s coronation — should vote Villaraigosa.
    — Josh Gohlke, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 June 2018
  • In a new spirit of iconoclasm, thousands of buildings, monuments and statues dedicated to American sinners of the past must be destroyed, removed or renamed.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, The Mercury News, 19 Sep. 2019
  • For all his prickly iconoclasm, Jobs had a reverence for Silicon Valley’s history and lore, Berlin observes.
    — Stephen Phillips, San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Nov. 2017
  • Part of that was a matter of changing tastes; but there was also a deliberate endeavor of people like de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg to market their iconoclasm.
    — Max Holleran, The New Republic, 14 Dec. 2021
  • Unfortunately, for all the early aughts talk of blogs taking over the world, the era of independent blogs turned out to be a brief one, and attempts to professionalize the blogging genre required stamping the iconoclasm out of it.
    — Alex Pareene, The New Republic, 7 Nov. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'iconoclasm.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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