Sentence examples for could be softened from inspiring English sources

The zero increases could be softened by a one-time bonus payment.

So if our advertising could be softened and still work, they'd be all for it.

She thought that failure could be softened, sweetened, made somehow less painful.

The blow could be softened, he suggested, by a policy he favours but which had been shelved: a tax break for married couples.

In antiquity Greece was the beneficiary of geography, the antechamber of the Near East — the place where the heartless systems of Egypt and Mesopotamia could be softened and humanized, leading to the invention of the West, so to speak.

Because of President Bush's speech to the United Nations on Thursday, there is a sense here that political opposition to military action against Iraq within Mr. Blair's Labor Party could be softened by a United Nations resolution authorizing force.

But the position taken by Mr. Cole suggested Republicans could be softening.

The terrain of this novel is Lili's interior landscape, which is no less a battlefield than Verdun, for Lili is at war with God, and she spends her intellectual ammunition on a quest for "a single, perfectly formed argument she could offer to the world: a proof of God's nonexistence that could not be softened by anything, not even by the notion of mystery".

He had then produced a specimen of such a bone, which could not be softened in water or destroyed by fire.

The landing could also be softened if investigators get more time to spend their stimulus money, which NIH can do to some degree by giving them 1-year, no-cost extensions, Lively said.

Traditionally a Lions team could expect to be softened up by a physical going-over in the early stages of a tour.