When you do something moral and upright and wander off by yourself, well, everyone doesn't always follow you, do they, right? You pat yourself on your sanctimonious back but it doesn't mean the crowd rewards you for doing what you think is right.
There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America's death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society.
I have a big problem when the sanctimonious, holier than thou congressmen and women go on national television for six hours and beat somebody up with a stick, and not because I'm 'Ms. Manners.' That's not what bothers me. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone.
I have a liberal definition of news because I think news can be what excites people. I'm not very sanctimonious about what news is and isn't.
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.
Joe Lieberman can be cloying and sanctimonious.
There are good intentions behind many people's conversion to veganism, including an admirable devotion to the well-being of animals and a justified skepticism about the crap the USDA allows manufacturers to put in our food. But it's hard to ignore the often sanctimonious nature of what some nutritionists view as an 'extremist' way of eating.
Can you, in a million years, imagine another female senator - Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Claire McCaskill - reacting to being called 'ma'am' like Barbara Boxer did? This is the kind of sanctimonious self-absorption on the modern left that makes my teeth itch.
Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have - whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need - into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.
