But his final remarks were just so pious and smug that he lost his advantage.
McKibben says: "BP's 'beyond petroleum' shtick was one of the great PR moves of all time, but it never amounted to anything – nor will the pious purring noises they're making now," he argues.
At the risk of sounding hopelessly pious, I would suggest one above all others: reading.
It was a refreshing surprise to encounter these glorious matriarchs in a country infamous for machismo and misogyny, where the stereotypical ideal female is the retiring mujer abnegada – a paragon of restraint and pious self-sacrifice.
He expects his wife Banafsheh to dress accordingly in the pious, working class south Tehran neighborhood where we ate.
Of course, it's easy to get too pious about this.
Now the magazine has taken matters into its own hands and saved its archive from some kind of pious oblivion.
It opened with numbing platitudes about "legislating for all the people" and ended with pious hopes about ridding the world of terror.
Erdogan, a pious Muslim who has been in power for more than a decade, stirred up controversy on Saturday when he claimed that Muslims discovered the Americas in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Christopher Columbus.
What unifies this evidence-lite package is the yawning gap between pious aspiration (not-so-pious stuff, too) and the realities it is likely to confront, including the forces – English peers as well as Scottish Nats – determined to block it.
The saddest object is the little lace pin cushion, embroidered with pious mottoes in her own hair by Annie Parker.
