Martin Filler

Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book.

American Critic

Daniel Hannan

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

British Politician

Alan Huffman

Long-distance train conversations are unlike the perfunctory exchanges one normally associates with strangers, or the truncated, cut-to-the-chase kind that sometimes take place between seatmates on a plane.

American Author

Rob Sheffield

It's kind of amazing how popular 'Grey's Anatomy' is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?

American Journalist

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Time is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.

English Novelist

Thomas Frank

Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.

Ron Perlman

The thing that's cool about the recording booth is that it's so perfunctory, so cut-to-the-chase.

American Actor

'Perfunctory' often implies a lack of emotion or interest in performing an action.

Emotionless Execution

The word suggests someone is doing something out of obligation, not because they want to.

Duty without Zeal

Use 'perfunctory' to describe an action done with the least effort necessary.

Minimal Effort

'Perfunctory' used in emotional contexts can convey a weak and unconvincing enthusiasm.

Weak Enthusiasm

When someone is disinterested, their actions can be described as 'perfunctory'.

Indifference in Action

Performances or presentations lacking passion might be 'perfunctory'.

Dispassionate Performance

 it is suffering from a second pernicious trend, what I call religious routine-ism. This is when our institutions and our leaders are stuck in a paradigm that is rote and perfunctory, devoid of life, devoid of vision

It's time to reclaim...

 some objects suggest that the world is actually basically banal and kind of perfunctory and ho-hum and they invite kind of indifference I think it's what