potentate

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

At Yale and Harvard, he encountered professors who “reigned as potentates, sure in the smugness of their positions, but utterly unaware of the lives of most Americans, including those that they professed to care about.”

From Washington Post

Church law says a pope can resign but the decision must be without outside pressure, a precaution that harkens back to the centuries when European potentates influenced the papacy.

From Reuters

Without any intervention by Nazi potentates, the refreshing and emotionally uplifting “waltzing bliss” was a perfect fit with National Socialist propaganda, in particular its broadcasting policy — as were Mozart and Lehár.

From New York Times

The images of crude propaganda were designed to impress visiting potentates.

From BBC

Donald Trump is that man; a power-craving hunter-gatherer con artist out to stake his claim as a modern-day potentate while imbued with the pusillanimous power of a puff pastry.

From Salon