Iran's Shia clergy had been politically assertive since the 19th century, tolerating impiety in the monarch provided he resist foreign colonialism and local heresies.
To combat her reputation as a monument of impiety, she commissioned sugary religious pictures although the inventory of her library (which listed five books of religious sermons and 215 of philosophy) may reveal her true tastes.
Vietnamese with Buddhist flags decried their government's impiety, while émigrés from Iran deplored their rulers' religious fervour.Inside the building, concerns were almost as diffuse.
Vaguely but plausibly, Socrates was accused of corrupting the young.The other charge, also familiar to Americans who distrust atheism in their public figures (even though their constitution would not admit it in court), was impiety.
If you tried to overthrow a caliph who was carrying out the will of God, that was impiety as well as treason; and if you poisoned the well of religious truth, you were undermining the political community as well as the faith.
According to ancient tradition, he was accused of impiety, his books were publicly burned, and he was exiled from Athens.
Herodotus believes in divine retribution as a punishment of human impiety, arrogance, and cruelty, but his emphasis is always on human actions and character rather than on the interventions of the gods, in his descriptions of historical events.
Malatesta won popularity as a ruler and distinction as a mercenary captain, but he also gained a reputation for impiety, vice, and brutality.
Opinion on both sides tended to fateful extremes, linking either the Revolution with impiety or the Roman Catholic Church with counterrevolution.
In his dialogue Crito, Plato fictionally cast his teacher, Socrates, imprisoned and sentenced to death (for impiety and corrupting the young), as faced with a choice between accepting the death penalty and escaping, thereby disobeying the law.
Plato's great admiration for Socrates was all the more remarkable because it coexisted not only with a recognition of why Socrates was considered dangerous but also with his belief that Socrates was, to some degree, guilty of impiety and of corrupting the young.
