Example sentences of "to [be] [adj] [be] [prep] " in BNC.

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1 In private Michael still had to keep his end up against attacks , that to be religious was to be a fool , though less frequently now because Frank travelled abroad and was away much of the time .
2 It is a paradox too , that because Christianity has been able to drop any mention of the physical cycles of women 's lives , secular culture has ended up with an idea that true liberation means we can forget ‘ those difficult days ’ , and ‘ carry on as normal ’ ; assuming , perhaps , that to be normal is to be more like a man .
3 The conflict in which the state is supposed to be neutral is about the ability of people to choose and successfully pursue conceptions of the good ( and these include ideals of the good society or world ) .
4 The only authentic way to be good is to be good ‘ for nothing ’ : that was to become the ringing insistence of her finest treatise , The Sovereignty of Good ( 1970 ) .
5 And it might even be said that it is from this , far more than from early Christianity , that we have inherited our sense of the dubious physical nature of the female , and our idea that the human norm is male and that to be female is in itself a pathological state .
6 Here the difficulty I found in talking about psychoanalytic criticism is compounded , not because I am an unbeliever , but because anything that the middle-aged male commentator says about feminism is liable to be wrong : to be approving may be condemned as patronizing , and to be critical is to be sexist .
7 Both behaviourism and ‘ humanistic ’ views would have us believe that to be affective is to be effective in setting up conditions for learning .
8 To be new was to be critical .
9 But I would place a somewhat different emphasis , and suggest that in the Chewong case fear is a positive emotion and encouraged in children because to be fearful is to be human , while the arousal of other inner states is negatively valued and discouraged — as manifest in the various rules that forbid them ( see Howell 1981 ) .
10 A second sense in which the inner-city phonology may be said to be complex is in the incidence of lexical items that have two alternative vowel pronunciations quite distinct phonetically and phonemically from each other .
11 She wanted to be safe , and the only way she knew how to be safe was to be rich . ’
12 That commercial television then proved to be popular is beside the point .
13 Professor Sawyer has argued that many of the small pre-Conquest landowners who appear from Domesday Book to be independent were in fact tenants of lords not named , and thus that lordship may have been more extensive than has sometimes been realised .
14 c Even disposable nappies/diapers which claim to be biodegradable are in practice virtually indestructible .
15 To be old is to be , of necessity , unhealthy .
16 To be old is to be unhealthy .
17 Estes and Binney ( 1988 , p. 69 ) describe the image of older people in America as ‘ to be old is to be frail , sick , dependent and vulnerable ’ .
18 To be old is to be wrinkled and crabbit and heading for Parkinson 's or Alzheimer 's disease .
19 Talcott Parsons has proposed the very influential theory that of all other available institutions it is the classroom that above all converts an incomplete person into a member of the kind of society Parsons takes for granted as natural , that is , a kind of society where to be social is to be interested in achievement .
20 Where Aldus have had to be careful is in avoiding building-in power features which would , for the average user , totally unbalance the product .
21 Dada and Aunt Tossie talked to each other with scarcely a pause , showing a concern for Maman 's silence as though to be silent was to be sick .
22 Not because we adhere to some outdated idea that to be commercial is to be tainted and somehow of no interest , but we felt we were redressing an imbalance .
23 To be slipshod is to be hounded , which is the last thing he wants .
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