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

Accordingly, also, this history could be called the history of the people, of their faults, their excesses, occasionally even of their crimes Slavery, ignorance and misery often deprave man in degrading him.

From The Galley Slave's Ring or The Family of Lebrenn. A Tale of The French Revolution of 1848 by Eug?ne Sue

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

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 William Ralph Inge

This faculty is more liable to perversion than any other, and excessive eating occasions more sickness, and depraves the animal faculties more than all other causes combined.

From The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology by L. N. Fowler

Should I select something that shows how war depraves, or something that shows how it ennobles?

From Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough by A. G. (Alfred George) Gardiner

You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

From Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

She calls for a “fearless reckoning with depraved art and artists,” which brings us back to the cultural cries surrounding us when we picked up this book.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 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

She began to cry, her depraved face breaking into an infant’s grimace; and they moved away from her, leaving her dirty in a dirty room, alone to face her Maker.

From "Go Tell It on the Mountain" by James Baldwin

Besides, how much slovenly thinking, which is slovenly expressed—vexing the public ear and depraving the taste and understanding of the reader—would never appear if the writer had to append his signature to his production?

From Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2) by George Jacob Holyoake

It is a dreadful example for younger artists, and I think Wagner is depraving them.

From Music-Study in Germany from the Home Correspondence of Amy Fay by Amy Fay

One girl might receive from a book a hundred evil suggestions, hopelessly depraving her imagination, while upon another it might not leave a single evil trace.

From The Library and Society Reprints of Papers and Addresses by Arthur Elmore Bostwick

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

Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion, depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the Revolution by perfidious applications.

From Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) Essay 1: Robespierre by John Morley