Tocqueville believed that war and colonization would "restore national pride, threatened", he believed, by "the gradual softening of social mores" in the middle classes.

A sharp decline in real estate prices in the United States, rather than the expected gradual softening, would crimp consumer spending.

This has meant a gradual softening of his trademark sign-off, which started out as "a great, strong class" and mysteriously lost its comma about a year later.

His gradual softening into a director of Hallmark-style sentimentality offers a cautionary case study of an artist succumbing to the bottom-line mentality of Hollywood.

It was perhaps the first sign of the gradual softening of the Tyrannian military spirit that more and more of such ships were being added to the navy.

Upon gradual softening of the colonial system, many tribes which were moved to Kayeli Bay started returning to their ancestral homes.

After 1956, with the Soviet cause politically and morally bankrupt, there came a gradual softening of the brutal Stalinist line of the immediate postwar years.

"But that's good: a gradual softening with no collapse."

Instead, he concentrated on her first faint shiver, on that gradual, glorious softening of her body against his.

The rehabilitation of the National Alliance would probably not have been possible without a gradual softening of the portrayal of Fascism both in the scholarly literature and the popular media.