In several key moments during the past few weeks, the governor showed a tendency to undermine some of his best moments and to make tough or difficult moments even worse.
Of one undistinguished ancestor, he remarks, "His regiment was not required at Austerlitz," and you catch the rueful pride of the congenital nonachiever, with his tendency "to undermine the highlights of my life".
With his eye for non-academic significance, Williams latterly tackled the contemporary relativist tendency to undermine the notion of truth.
We find relatives of this suggestion in Becker's argument (1974) that the criminal wrongfulness of crimes consists in their tendency to cause 'social volatility', and in Dimock's argument (1997) that it lies in their tendency to undermine the kinds of trust upon which civic life depends.
The episode captures her habit of undermining herself, when the worst might have been averted by a little candor and grace — a tendency that has reappeared in the past few weeks, as her campaign has responded to the shock of Obama's challenge.
This may have the effect of undermining 'design bias'.
If this is a correct account of the character of liberal ideology and of the aims of liberal politics, Schmitt is right to conclude that liberalism has a tendency to undermine a community's political existence, as he understands it.
Increased availability of health enhancing products and services (e.g., primary health care, fresh produce) tends to promote population health, while increased availability of health detracting products and services (e.g., liquor stores) has a tendency to undermine population health.
An anthropologist from another world who wanted to know whether the sentence is true would set about investigating a set of sociological facts; from the anthropologist's perspective, facts about the monetary value of gold are mind-dependent "only in the sense that they supervene directly on facts about our minds … [but] this has no tendency to undermine their objectivity" (302).
"Don't come here with that white tendency... undermining blacks!" Malema shouted.
