deprave

"I don't think you should censor books but there is this strange anomaly - it's common sense that films can deprave and corrupt, and that books can't."

From BBC ● Aug. 31, 2012

It has been 14 years since China officially banned console video games, worrying the living-room boxes would dumb down or deprave the brains of Chinese youth.

From Washington Post

The legal definition of obscenity in Great Britain is that which tends "to deprave and corrupt."

From Time Magazine Archive

On the contrary it would so deprave our currency that it would bring ruin, particularly to the wage earners of the country and those on fixed salaries.

From Time Magazine Archive

This diathesis is produced by those agencies which deprave the blood and waste vitality.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 68, June, 1863 by Various

Such teaching is interesting as showing how the admission of caprice in the world of phenomena reacts upon the moral sense and depraves our conception of God and salvation.

From Christian Mysticism by Inge, William Ralph

Sometimes they produce an insufficient performance of it; and this, by closing an avenue of elimination, poisons the blood, and depraves the organization.

From Sex in Education or, A Fair Chance for Girls by Clarke, Edward Hammond

She furthermore held that hereditary rule depraves the best dispositions, and produces the monsters that have horrified the world.

From The Branding Needle, or The Monastery of Charolles A Tale of the First Communal Charter by Sue, Eugène

It is the masters of slaves, not the slaves, who are deficient in self-rule; and slavery is doubly detestable, because it depraves the masters.

From Phases of Faith Passages from the History of My Creed by Newman, Francis William

It is not because war kills that it is the devil, but because it depraves; and it is because it depraves that it is condemned by the religious consciousness.

From Home Missions in Action by Allen, Edith H.

“The Shards” is more problematic: Mr. Ellis has been recycling his depraved teen angels long enough that the show, a collaboration with Ryan Murphy, becomes parody, even comedy.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026

Neill seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved.

From Salon ● Jul. 17, 2026

Yet its parties, even at their most decadent and depraved, were never quite cool.

From Slate ● Mar. 30, 2026

But even people who are really depraved have something they love, he says.

From BBC ● Mar. 7, 2026

My mother is currently associating with some undesirables who are attempting to transform her into an athlete of sorts, depraved specimens of mankind who regularly bowl their way to oblivion.

From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole

If the American practice were half as depraving as it ought logically to be in their conditions, their social system would drop to pieces.

From Through the Eye of the Needle A Romance by Howells, William Dean

Separated from one another in actual date by 50, perhaps by 100 years,742 they must needs have branched off from a common corrupt ancestor, and straightway become exposed continuously to fresh depraving influences.

From The Revision Revised by Burgon, John William

I sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one was secured against want by the common provision, and against the degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want.

From Through the Eye of the Needle A Romance by Howells, William Dean

A naive expression used by Agnes was represented as depraving the one; a low and somewhat vulgar phrase was insisted upon as calculated to ruin the other.

From Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Lives of More Than 200 of the Most Prominent Personages in History by Horne, Charles F. (Charles Francis)

These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening its relish for sound food.

From Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4 by Randolph, Thomas Jefferson