It was a lofty statement of principle, indifferent to the real risk of persecution that Wang faced.
It's a lofty statement, the kind one might expect to hear from the head of a nonprofit.
There was just one problem with this lofty statement of preparedness: Fallon was at that very moment winging his way in quite the opposite direction – to Sierra Leone, as it happened – in a quite spectacular mismatch of words and deeds.
It's just like the self-effacing Mr. Earley to begin this appealing little book with dueling quotations re Hemingway's "Green Hills of Africa," one a lofty statement by Hemingway on his intentions, and the other a quote from T. S. Matthews, of Time magazine.
Parties are long on lofty statements, short on anything resembling a policy, and the opposition spends more time squabbling than devising a common platform.
It seems far removed from the legal ruling, and from the lofty statements by some folk that Valley Head is the Thermopylae in the fight to keep God in American public life.
Beneath such lofty statements, though, was a complicated political fight provoked unexpectedly last week when Mr. Berlusconi ordered his party's government ministers to resign from the shaky coalition, in hopes of forcing new elections.
"Such international get-togethers have ended with lofty statements and commitments which have not, sadly, been delivered or moved to implementation," said Mary chiefry-Hesse, chief adviser to President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana.
Faced with new revelations about the surveillance state, Chomsky might engage in data mining, juxtaposing our politicians' lofty statements about freedom against their secretive actions, thereby revealing their utter hypocrisy.
Mr. Otunnu, who has met government officials and rebel leaders involved in wars in Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Sierra Leone and Colombia, is struck by the dissonance between their lofty statements of their aims and the brutality around them.
In explaining the movie, Daniel Barber, who is making his directorial début, has issued alarmed and lofty statements about needing to "ask ourselves how we got to this point — the point where it's easier for kids to make a living from crime and drugs than a nine-to-five job".
