Sentence examples for if not mere from inspiring English sources

After all, what are we all, if not "mere clusters of cells"?

If we were to dig up these two men, skulls are about all we would find, if not mere dust.

Dispiriting because as exemplars of true audacity, they have few imitators today either in Western Europe or America, where banks are trying to secure their profits by destroying social welfare regimes and politicians are at most anxious onlookers if not mere puppets of the banks.

So if it was not mere everyday experience that led to Galileo's discovery, what did?

Unlike poinsettias, both can live for decades (not mere days) if treated well.

It is not mere gossip, which, if harmful, can be remedied in a civil suit.

If the greatness of humanity is not mere human self-aggrandisement, then such greatness may consist at its core in a moral capacity to look beyond the interests of oneself and one's close associates, and to show a willingness to care for and share with those who are less able to fend for themselves.

(Brock 2009: 200) Given both the relative shortage of health care professions in Africa and the fact that many posit a human right to a decent minimum level of health care, the recruitment (if not the mere admission) of doctors and nurses from developing countries would seem to raise human rights issues.

But if not by mere luck, how did buy and hold succeed for decades?

No generation before the postwar, nuclear intelligentsia understood the universal strivings for freedom, and if not freedom, mere existence, in more universally shattering terms.

They are not mere companions.