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
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2015 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

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
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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References in periodicals archive ?
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
Most libertarians I know moralize a great deal about such evils as force, fraud, coercion, oppression, and tyranny, and most would sympathize with the "live and let live" formulation, but most would also be likely to insist on a clarification of the vague, dodgy language about "the public's right to uphold moral standards."
For heaven's sake: religious accommodation and other openings for big-government conservatism
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
He focuses in particular on the work of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), whose drawings were defined both by a desire to record the natural world as accurately as possible and by a tendency to moralize on the basis of what he took to be the symbolic significance of various flora and fauna.
Recent Italian works on the Renaissance: perspectives on intellectual, political, and social history
I don't want to have to moralize my pleasure in order for it to pass muster.
"My" masculinity
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)
Taken together this evidence reveals how the British of the late eighteenth century conceived of "mourning as a process that generates, perpetuates, and moralizes social relations." (p.
Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria
In examining the coverage of the Ripper case in the French press Leps moralizes that "had the events been apprehended dialectically as part of broader social, economic, and political conflicts taking place in industrial societies, French readers could have been implicated in rather than diverted by, the crimes." Leps fails however to explain how "political, social and economic conflicts" inspired the Ripper murders nor does she explain how the French public was implicated in them.
Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse
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