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

No possible amount of good to ever so many can make it right to deprave ever so few;—happiness and misery cannot be measured so!

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 23, September, 1859 by Various

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

To this it is to be added "that the possession of power depraves men."

From Anarchism by Paul Eltzbacher

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

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

Ah! why hath Nature to so hard a hart Given so goodly giftes of beauties grace, Whose pryde depraves each other better part, And all those pretious ornaments deface?

From The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 by Edmund Spenser

To teach it depraves the one who teaches it, and the one who accepts it.

From The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit by Ralph Waldo Trine

He 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

However perverse and depraved the ideas that animate the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah, they inspire the kind of conviction that motivates people to fight grimly on against the odds.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 15, 2026

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

From Slate ● Mar. 30, 2026

Judge John Dodd KC told Wood Green Crown Court that Chan was a "perverse and depraved" man who had "clearly lost all sense of moral compass".

From BBC ● Feb. 12, 2026

And since it was about the only jewelry I’d seen in an entire year, it could have been diamonds—I was that depraved.

From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

Consequently its real action, always in contradiction of the humanitarian theories which it professes, has constantly exercised a disastrous and depraving influence.

From God and the State by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin

For this purpose a section is added upon human life and manners; in which he is cautioned against the danger of indulging his passions, of vitiating his habits, and depraving his sentiments.

From The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume 05 Miscellaneous Pieces by Samuel Johnson

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

He was cursed with the possession of a power and authority which no man of narrow mind, bitter prejudices, and inordinate self-estimation can exercise without depraving himself as well as injuring the nation.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 by Various

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