How to Use sanctimonious in a Sentence

sanctimonious

adjective
  • Most of this managed to come off both lazy and sanctimonious.
    — David Polansky, Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 12 July 2024
  • He was seen by some, then and later, as prickly and sanctimonious.
    — Susan Page, USA TODAY, 29 Dec. 2024
  • But power can be misused as much in the hands of the sanctimonious as the corrupt.
    — Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ, 7 Sep. 2017
  • More than family, my poor roommates at the time got the worst of my newfound sanctimonious zeal.
    — David G. Allan, CNN, 27 Nov. 2024
  • If that’s not your first concern — if your moral high ground is colored by love of a rival or sanctimonious hypocrisy — let’s pipe down.
    — Graham Couch, Detroit Free Press, 21 Oct. 2017
  • The villains of his films are always the most sanctimonious players with the loudest moral outrage, on both the left and the right.
    — Matthew Marden., Town & Country, 20 Sep. 2021
  • The hypocrisy of these sanctimonious liberals is just amazing.
    — Fox News Staff, Fox News, 16 Sep. 2022
  • That is not to suggest the novel is a catalog of horrors or a sanctimonious lecture.
    — Rumaan Alam, The New Republic, 13 Mar. 2020
  • Trolls claim to be puncturing pieties, saving the sanctimonious from themselves.
    — Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 23 Oct. 2024
  • There are few things in this world more sanctimonious and hypocritical than left-wing sportswriters getting on their faux moral high horse.
    — Ian Miller Outkick, FOXNews.com, 15 June 2026
  • His sense of duty yields an effortful and sanctimonious movie that, at the same time, takes its place in a lamentable recent trend.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 7 Jan. 2020
  • What the most virulent, nauseatingly sanctimonious of the free speech woke folks want is freedom for their speech.
    — Bob Guccione Jr, Spin, 20 Sep. 2023
  • Nope — those three sanctimonious defenders of our democracy are all down with the deep-state’s diminution of our democracy.
    — Voice Of The People, New York Daily News, 24 June 2024
  • This book exists, in other words, in order for Karp to have written a book … The book is filled with this sort of sanctimonious guff.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Dec. 2025
  • There is something vicariously thrilling about the idea of taking down this cruel, sanctimonious man.
    — Meredith Blakestaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 26 Aug. 2022
  • The longstanding, sanctimonious network guideline of not showing yahoos running on the field should end.
    — Marc Bona, cleveland, 8 Feb. 2021
  • Some, especially in the western parts of the country, have long seen him as too showy and sanctimonious, an elitist do-gooder who was never up to the job.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 20 Sep. 2019
  • Trump's in-your-face lying and hucksterism is almost preferable to the sanctimonious sycophancy of Pence.
    — Peter Bergen, CNN, 6 Mar. 2022
  • My desire for friends outweighed my duty to uphold the sanctimonious culinary standards of my parents’ homeland.
    — Carla Ciccone, Bon Appetit, 7 May 2018
  • Forget any sanctimonious spewing sermon about pro sports foolishly believing these types of things would not happen.
    — Mac Engel, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 23 Oct. 2025
  • My Mom Died, has inspired sanctimonious comments on Goodreads and beyond, as well as praise for its brash sense of bravery.
    — Michelle Ruiz, Vogue, 18 Aug. 2022
  • Look, sports and sanctimonious have gone hand in hand from the earliest of days of newspaper columnists to the most recent of social-media outlets.
    — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 12 Mar. 2026
  • In keeping with the car's brutal new persona, the replacement chip promises a much less sanctimonious attitude.
    — Barry Winfield, WIRED, 1 May 1994
  • One of the things that history is good for is puncturing our sanctimonious self-satisfaction about our own moral rectitude.
    — David Marchese, New York Times, 31 May 2021
  • Why not take the more interesting (if challenging) route of explaining how the best films of the past surpass today’s sanctimonious films?
    — Armond White, National Review, 31 Mar. 2021
  • Most yawn that Mark Zuckerberg and Pope Francis have given one too many sanctimonious rants that project their own hypocrisies.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 26 Sep. 2017
  • But not everyone believes the military is something Trump, of all people, should be sanctimonious about.
    — Isobel Thompson, vanityfair.com, 23 Oct. 2017
  • The campus Hillel chapter should have dismissed the apology as a stunt, sanctimonious and empty.
    — WSJ, 25 Oct. 2022
  • There is nothing reminiscent here of the haughty and sanctimonious Thoreau who is folded into the pages of Walden.
    — Andrea Wulf, The Atlantic, 6 Oct. 2017
  • No sanctimonious emphasis is required to note the irony of that message coming from a family for whom nepotism is as natural as breathing.
    — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 19 May 2022

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