empty promise

Do not accept this as an empty promise; I attach so much importance to it that I am ready to make any compensation for it.

After-events show that this was merely an empty promise, and that he had no intention of fulfilling it.

Pleased and flattered to be bribed, although by nothing but an empty promise, the Judge let him go.

Kit felt the señora had not used conventionally the polite good-bye; anyhow he had not given her an empty promise.

In this rebellion he was again deluded by the glamour of Egypt, and reliance on the empty promise of "horses and much people."