1. at any rate - Adverb
2. at any rate - Phrase
used to indicate that a statement explains or supports a previous statement
if nothing else (`leastwise' is informal and `leastways' is colloquial)
Source: WordNetI am assured at any rate Man's practically inexterminate. Someday I must go into that. There's always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at. Robert Frost
The road to Hades is easy to travel; at any rate men pass away with their eyes shut. Bion of Borysthenes
Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life. G. E. M. Anscombe
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them. Northrop Frye
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Oscar Wilde