respectability

He desires respectability, but savors the buzz, the camaraderie — the honor among thieves.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 20, 2026

"The picture they tried to present to the outside world was one of respectability," he said.

From BBC ● Jun. 18, 2026

One of Christianity’s deepest convictions is that social standing, respectability and material recognition are not the measures of a life.

From Salon ● Jun. 5, 2026

There was something else that academics offered Epstein beyond a veneer of respectability: access.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 26, 2026

If she has no wool for the darning and the stockings are dark we can blacken our ankles with shoe polish for the respectability that’s in it.

From "Angela's Ashes: A Memoir" by Frank McCourt

His neuroticism, although he learned to control it. left him with a lifelong terror of going beyond the "cleanly respectabilities."

From Time Magazine Archive

The relation of the village respectabilities to the county families, the relation of the county families to the great ducal magnate, are all given with curious precision and subtle discrimination.

From Studies in Early Victorian Literature by Frederic Harrison

The Devil at which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the Philistines, which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc., for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 71, September, 1863 by Various

Adieu, my Friend: it is silent Sunday; the populace not yet admitted to their beer- shops, till the respectabilities conclude their rubric- mummeries,—a much more audacious feat than beer!

From The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. by Thomas Carlyle

He was in point of fact the soul of sobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his serious dissenting world.

From Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle by Henry Noel Brailsford