“True, madam, those who have most virtue in their mouths, have least of it in their bosom,” Marlow says to Kate in Oliver Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer.”
I recently saw the play at Shakespeare in the Park in Dallas, and I discovered, during a little bit of online investigation, that Oliver Goldsmith disliked the “hypocrisy of sanctimony.”
I also learned that sanctimony is a combination of sanctity and sacred. A sanctimonious person thinks he or she is holy or religious, but has an attitude that comes across more like “holier-than-thou.”
–Joy