deify

In a 1942 essay, Hall wrote: “All followers who offer to adorn and deify their teachers set up a false condition. Human beings, experience has proved, make better humans than they do gods.”

From Los Angeles Times ● May 15, 2025

We build monuments and deify leaders in an effort to transcend our mortality.

From Scientific American ● Feb. 28, 2022

It’s a fascinating exploration of the paradoxes of humanity’s religious instincts — and the power of followers to deify flawed mortals against their will.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 28, 2022

American society tends to deify businesses and and athletes, he said.

From Seattle Times ● Jul. 27, 2021

Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

In a culture that deifies celebrities, Williams remains one whose memory is often invoked with affectionate nostalgia, accompanied by some of his better movie quotes, or from one of his stand-up sets.

From Salon ● Dec. 4, 2023

While Butler humanizes Elvis, Luhrmann deifies him and argues that he possessed far more radical potential, both musically and politically, than he was allowed.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 23, 2022

Gebru said the way the tech industry is covered by the media, which to her deifies tech leaders, helps shield tech companies from scrutiny.

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 15, 2021

“Some men she extols, exalts, and almost deifies; others, whose virtues are far greater, and whose characters are more deserving of commendation, she passes by unheeded, and puts the finger of silence on her lips.”

From Washington Times ● Sep. 16, 2020

Perhaps we shall understand these things a little better if we remember that this occultist, if he contradicts the Buddha, on the other hand almost deifies Mrs. Besant.

From H. P. Blavatsky A Great Betrayal by Alice Leighton Cleather

It’s a Taoist temple where people come to worship Guan Di, a deified Chinese general revered as the god of commerce and war.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 6, 2026

The themes of performances at Mr Gopalakrishnan's house include honouring a deified ancestor, venerating a warrior-hunter deity, and worshipping tiger spirits symbolising strength and protection.

From BBC ● Nov. 30, 2024

There was even a time when even George W. Bush was practically deified.

From Salon ● Aug. 26, 2024

For some Kānaka Maoli with genealogical ties to the volcano goddess Pele as a deified ancestor, an eruption is something to be accepted, possibly even celebrated.

From New York Times ● Dec. 9, 2022

By 1608 it was possible to complain that ‘nowadays the discoverers of new things are virtually deified’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

“They are not perfect. They are not perfect. We have to stop deifying them,” Mr. Lemon said.

From Washington Times ● Jul. 9, 2020

It acts as a deifying diptych to that of The Epic – from space to the earthly pursuit of heaven.

From The Guardian ● Nov. 21, 2019

One is a pitch-dark, but also visually cute, animated series that has perfected, by not deifying or lauding, the antihero, who this season was even more explicitly shown to be a #MeToo creep.

From Slate ● Dec. 15, 2018

Traditionally, the people drawing up our cultural canons have been an elite group of scholars and critics who embraced a work of art and sent it aloft to some deifying realm.

From New York Times ● May 30, 2018

God is depicted as an architect with His plan drafted before He began the erection of the edifice,—a conception which avoids all danger of deifying the Logos.

From Jewish Theology by Kaufmann Kohler