Sentence examples for symbolic substance from inspiring English sources

The crucial feature in all these cases is that the violent act is not a spontaneous outburst of brutal energy that breaks the chains of civilised customs, but something learned, externally imposed, ritualised, part of collective symbolic substance of a community.

It also revolves around a symbolic essential substance: in this case, a crystalline icelike material, mined from a meteor, that can awaken the power of speech in selected human hearts.

Clothes can carry symbolic meaning.

The current energy policy debate in Washington D.C. is based on an exchange of propaganda and talking points, as well as a preoccupation with symbolic and substance-free ideologically grounded positions.

Chinese leaders see time running out to consolidate the improved relationship.In this section Symbolism as substance Don't think, just teach A number of great import ReprintsThe meeting itself was a photo opportunity, more symbolic than substantive.

And then someone else said: 'Let's take that bust of Lenin and put it outside the council chamber', and my heart sank again because I knew it was a symbolic gesture with no substance.

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank "fee") won't cut it.

Institutionalization is a process whereby an organizational innovation is taken-for-granted and infused with symbolic value without real substance as time goes by.

The production of such works was accompanied by the writing of essays in which the artist stressed the alleged failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed "the symbolic character of physical substances".

"This was style over substance and a symbolic gesture," Mr. McDonough said.

McCain's selection of a woman with less than two years' experience running a state with a population a quarter the size of Brooklyn, suggests that his decision was based in large part on Palin's symbolic value rather than on substance.