debase

These stories tell us that Diogenes was chased out of his native Sinope, on the north coast of what’s now Turkey, for his supposed role in a scheme to debase the city’s currency.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 17, 2025

“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump said, then he proceeded to debase a journalist who wasn’t there to report on the event because he’d been silenced, forever.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 20, 2025

I knew he was trying to be menacing, but I didn’t feel fear so much as astonishment at the way this adult was willing to debase himself to ruin our night.

From Slate ● Feb. 10, 2025

Trust me, I’ve made the mistake of debating perhaps the world’s most infamous anti-vaccine figure, and all it does is debase science and harm the public.

From Scientific American ● Jun. 29, 2023

Just because the world was unjust didn’t mean that I must debase myself as well.

From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros

"Has Mr Putin ever used one crude word to address you? This has never happened. Therefore, I think that such vocabulary debases America itself," he added.

From BBC ● Feb. 22, 2024

And that vision, that fight, in the midst of everything that degrades and debases you, you pull upon community, you pull upon cultural power, you pull upon your spirituality, and you pull upon hope.

From Slate ● Oct. 6, 2020

Said corporation's very wealthy owner insults the court and her client, then debases Julius himself after the judge has the man jailed for contempt, which he is well within his rights to do.

From Salon ● May 14, 2020

Art museum membership is usually pitched as a way to get admission discounts, which debases the museum enterprise as a mere commercial transaction.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 12, 2019

It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

From "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

Whereas the European gothic, he concludes, was “an enlightened attack on a debased ruling class or entrenched superstition,” its American version emerged as “a Calvinist exposé of natural human corruption.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 2026

The very concepts of intellectualism, and of objective knowledge itself, have been debased by a kind of Gresham’s Law, with the bad driving out the good.

From Salon ● Apr. 19, 2026

Meanwhile, the tenor of public debate was steadily debased.

From BBC ● Mar. 18, 2023

Disagreements with Professor Wax, he added, make you feel that “you are a fundamentally debased human being.”

From New York Times ● Mar. 13, 2023

The remarks grew ever more debased and treacherous so that Mr Charles - at least so he claimed - was obliged to intervene with the suggestion that such talk was bad form.

From "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Robbie’s most deliciously debasing scene is when she throws coins on the ground for a desperate beggar — and then that person forces her to watch as he picks them up.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2026

Argentina has a history of debasing its currency, which is why its people keep billions of dollars in coffee cans, home safes and mattresses.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 12, 2025

Dismissing the case, Mr Justice Chamberlain said Yaxley-Lennon's own barrister had accepted there was no evidence his client had been segregated "for the purpose of breaking his resistance or humiliating or debasing him".

From BBC ● Mar. 21, 2025

But Kidman isn’t debasing herself or regressing just for the sick sight of it all.

From Salon ● Dec. 23, 2024

For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.

From "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley