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

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

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

From Time Magazine Archive

It is painful to observe the almost inevitable tendency of power to deprave the soul.

From The Empire of Russia by John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

All around him the fish in their perfect freshness exhaled a pleasant perfume, that slightly sharp, irritating perfume which depraves the appetite.

From The Fat and the Thin by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

From Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 1 by Thomas Jefferson Randolph

An education which does not cultivate the will, is an education that depraves the mind.

From The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France

Civilisation, in this case, depraves the birds, as often it does men.

From The Truth About Woman by C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine) Hartley

And then there is the money, which depraves when it comes in a certain way.”

From Other People's Money by Émile Gaboriau

You would respect the movie more if it stuck with its depraved indifference to civilized behavior, rather than attempting a death-bed conversion to decency.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026

Calling him a "depraved individual", the judge at Nottingham Crown Court handed him a two-year suspended prison sentence.

From BBC ● Apr. 9, 2026

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

From Slate ● Mar. 30, 2026

Intimately acquainted with Richard’s malignity, these ruined royals know only too well the toll of his depraved machinations.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 26, 2026

“Those planes belong to the syndicate, and everybody has a share. Confiscate? How can you possibly confiscate your own private property? Confiscate, indeed! I’ve never heard anything so depraved in my whole life.”

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller

Better to devote one’s self to a useful and humble profession than employ one’s talent in depraving morals, and degrading souls.

From Elements of Morals With Special Application of the Moral Law to the Duties of the Individual and of Society and the State by Paul Janet

No one can fail to recognise the depraving influence of a corrupt imagination; and the corruption may spring, not only from suggestions from without, but from those which rise spontaneously in our minds.

From The Map of Life Conduct and Character by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

You would think that this predicament must deprave, and so without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving.

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

For they wax more proud, more wayward, more envious, suspicious, misjudging and depraving other men, with the delight of their own praise, and such other spiritual vices of the soul.

From Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens by Monica Stevens

His own example has had a depraving influence.

From Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 by James Kennedy