moralize


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moralize about (someone or something)

To discuss or proclaim moral judgments or observations about a particular person or thing, especially in a trite or obvious manner. These politicians need to spend less time moralizing about the nature of drug addiction and homelessness, and spend more time helping the people in society who are most vulnerable. Plenty of people have moralized about the country's dictator, but so far no one has done anything to curb his power.
See also: moralize

moralize about someone or something

to utter moral platitudes about someone or something. There is no point in moralizing about Carlo. He can't be changed. Why are you moralizing about the election? The people are always right.
See also: moralize
References in periodicals archive ?
Guide To Getting It On does not moralize, nor does it proselytize.
Guide To Getting It On
In art, there's always an attempt to moralize after the fact, to resolve and make it legible.
Banks Violette
She refers several times to biting criticisms she received from persons who later felt free from a comfortable distance to criticize and even moralize about her behavior during captivity.
Wakefield, Sarah F. Six weeks in the Sioux Tepees; a fascinating first-person account of a woman's six-week captivity by the Sioux in 1862
Unlike Americans, the French did not moralize about weight-loss.
Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West
Even stranger, Clark makes a cameo appearance in Bully as paterfamilias to a house of boys, taking the brief role as an opportunity to moralize, something he never does in his photographs.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER
Her refusal to moralize in Eichmann in Jerusalem conveyed stylistically as well as philosophically "the banality of evil," withholding the textual Valium of righteous indignation from the Jewess point of view.
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975
I don't want to have to moralize my pleasure in order for it to pass muster.
"My" masculinity
Clifford is not a novel that moralizes or preaches; rather, its themes provoke the reader to draw conclusions for himself or herself about whether those on the margins of society are capable of finding inroads back into their graces--or whether they should even want to.
Clifford
Glissenti fully moralizes work by suggesting that each art has its proper and improper practice.
The Artes and the Ars moriendi in late renaissance Venice: the professions in Fabio Glissenti's 'Discorsi morali contra il dispiacer del morire, detto Athanatophilia' (1596)
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