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

They alter, they force, they deprave the meaning of three or four words, and all is done.

From What Is Free Trade? An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Éconimiques" Designed for the American Reader by Frédéric Bastiat

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

It is the masters of slaves, not the slaves, who are deficient in self-rule; and slavery is doubly detestable, because it depraves the masters.

From Phases of Faith Passages from the History of My Creed by Francis William Newman

It is not because war kills that it is the devil, but because it depraves; and it is because it depraves that it is condemned by the religious consciousness.

From Home Missions in Action by Edith H. Allen

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

From The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France

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

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

He also accused Donaldson of telling lies many times over the years and added, he never imagined the former party leader could have been so "depraved".

From BBC ● Jun. 23, 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

We’ve watched Macbeth change from a noble, trusted, dedicated soldier, willing to sacrifice his life for king and country, to a wretched, depraved, corrupt murderer who no longer has feelings of guilt or morality.

From "Tears of a Tiger" by Sharon M. Draper

D, that it bears marks throughout of the depraving influence of the ancient Lectionary practice.

From The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark by John William Burgon

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

Truth is the only basis of virtue; and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.

From Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

A naive expression used by Agnes was represented as depraving the one; a low and somewhat vulgar phrase was insisted upon as calculated to ruin the other.

From Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Lives of More Than 200 of the Most Prominent Personages in History by Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

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