How to Use moralist in a Sentence

moralist

noun
  • Swift was a moralist in matters of the heart, and once someone broke her trust all bets were off.
    — Carrie Battan, The New Yorker, 17 Nov. 2021
  • As is inevitable with truly great satire, the satirist had become a moralist.
    — M. D. Aeschliman, National Review, 11 Oct. 2020
  • Reactionary moralists, either way, scare me — and that speaks to the other side.
    — Jeff Jacobs, courant.com, 19 Aug. 2017
  • And an effective moralist would do this in an engaging and compelling way.
    — Yuval Levin, National Review, 31 Dec. 2019
  • The trade of Drake is hardly some line in the sand for football purists or anti-tanking moralists.
    — Dave Hyde, sun-sentinel.com, 28 Oct. 2019
  • If so, the moralist’s alignment was, if nothing else, flexible.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, WSJ, 24 Oct. 2021
  • Preserve only, in a thousand or so verses, the bare details and pure utterance of a dead-on moralist.
    — James Parker, The Atlantic, 10 Oct. 2020
  • The ablest moralist is thus almost inevitably a kind of intellectual.
    — Yuval Levin, National Review, 31 Dec. 2019
  • No, the toughest Stoppard is the moralist, who, from first to last, is vexed by the spectacle of freedom under threat.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 2021
  • Great satirists can’t entirely be moralists, even now, being as the latter contradicts the former.
    — Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 8 Apr. 2018
  • Garfield, an idealistic moralist, happens to catch his colleagues at a time that even the movers and shakers have tired of the corruption.
    — Inkoo Kang, New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2025
  • An even fiercer moralist, her work continues to drive home the message that wars are far less often fought on grounds of idealism than of cynicism and greed.
    — Judith MacKrell, WSJ, 17 Dec. 2021
  • The old moralists understood the dangers of insisting on the repayment of unpayable debts.
    — Martin Sandbu, Foreign Affairs, 12 Dec. 2017
  • But his argument sounded so sober, so tongue-in-cheek, that many of his contemporaries took it as the great moralist's true stance, and denounced him as a savage.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 29 Oct. 2021
  • Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
    — Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic, 2 Jan. 2026
  • King became safe and ethereal, registering as a noble moralist.
    — Time Staff, Time, 4 Apr. 2018
  • Miller was fascinated by Henrik Ibsen—a moralist with a flair for the dramatic.
    — Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 2017
  • Christian moralists thundered against the sinful pleasures of watching naked female flesh at the Spectacles.
    — Literary Hub, 15 Apr. 2026
  • The gaydar of a founding mother and a Jesuit moralist will always be far more attuned than the intuition of a mob of reactionary haters.
    — Literary Hub, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Food writers are divided into two major branches, the sensualists and the moralists.
    — Max Watman, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2018
  • The kid from Riverhead is also a kind of moralist, a highly analytical truth-teller on the financial markets.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 23 Mar. 2022
  • The moralist in us wants to judge good or bad, and Shakespeare had this ability to withhold that judgment for as long as possible, to understand the complexity.
    — David Marchesephoto Illustration By Bráulio Amado, New York Times, 12 Mar. 2021
  • In order to shame churchmen and laypeople alike into being less focused on wealth and luxury, moralists mobilized all the rhetorical weapons at their disposal.
    — Sara Lipton, The New York Review of Books, 17 June 2019
  • Professor Pipes, a moralist shaped by his experiences as a Jew who had fled the Nazi occupation of Poland, would have none of it.
    — New York Times, 17 May 2018
  • When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books.
    — Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic, 2 Jan. 2026
  • Specifically, moralists either destroyed or rounded up and put away all statuary and inscriptions concerning the bad, dead emperor.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 22 Aug. 2017
  • The hatemongers, moralists, police chiefs, and industrialists formed a sinister cabal, conspiring to subvert the work of the wise jurists who dared oppose them.
    — Ian MacDougall, Harper's Magazine, 12 Sep. 2022
  • Of course, the moralists of old who were trying to save the family unit from the destruction caused by pornography and homosexuality were completely different.
    — Jon Caldara, The Denver Post, 27 Dec. 2019
  • Exploitation Claims Hefner enraged feminists, moralists and family groups alike.
    — David Henry, Bloomberg.com, 28 Sep. 2017
  • Hartman pushes past the social workers, psychologists and scandalized moralists standing in our way to reveal the women for the first time, individual and daring.
    — New York Times, 5 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'moralist.' 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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