debase
Example Sentences
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That trade is based on the view that investors will turn to alternative assets like gold or bitcoin on worries that stubborn government deficits and higher inflation will debase currencies like the dollar.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 27, 2026
These stories tell us that Diogenes was chased out of his native Sinope, on the north coast of what’s now Turkey, for his supposed role in a scheme to debase the city’s currency.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 17, 2025
“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump said, then he proceeded to debase a journalist who wasn’t there to report on the event because he’d been silenced, forever.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 20, 2025
I knew he was trying to be menacing, but I didn’t feel fear so much as astonishment at the way this adult was willing to debase himself to ruin our night.
From Slate ● Feb. 10, 2025
Just because the world was unjust didn’t mean that I must debase myself as well.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
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He added that such vocabulary "debases America itself".
From BBC ● Feb. 22, 2024
And that vision, that fight, in the midst of everything that degrades and debases you, you pull upon community, you pull upon cultural power, you pull upon your spirituality, and you pull upon hope.
From Slate ● Oct. 6, 2020
Said corporation's very wealthy owner insults the court and her client, then debases Julius himself after the judge has the man jailed for contempt, which he is well within his rights to do.
From Salon ● May 14, 2020
Art museum membership is usually pitched as a way to get admission discounts, which debases the museum enterprise as a mere commercial transaction.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 12, 2019
It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
From "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin
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Whereas the European gothic, he concludes, was “an enlightened attack on a debased ruling class or entrenched superstition,” its American version emerged as “a Calvinist exposé of natural human corruption.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 2026
The very concepts of intellectualism, and of objective knowledge itself, have been debased by a kind of Gresham’s Law, with the bad driving out the good.
From Salon ● Apr. 19, 2026
The most debased and tragic is Jeff, who, with his wife, has worked at the fair for decades.
From New York Times ● May 30, 2024
Meanwhile, the tenor of public debate was steadily debased.
From BBC ● Mar. 18, 2023
The remarks grew ever more debased and treacherous so that Mr Charles - at least so he claimed - was obliged to intervene with the suggestion that such talk was bad form.
From "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Robbie’s most deliciously debasing scene is when she throws coins on the ground for a desperate beggar — and then that person forces her to watch as he picks them up.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2026
Argentina has a history of debasing its currency, which is why its people keep billions of dollars in coffee cans, home safes and mattresses.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 12, 2025
Dismissing the case, Mr Justice Chamberlain said Yaxley-Lennon's own barrister had accepted there was no evidence his client had been segregated "for the purpose of breaking his resistance or humiliating or debasing him".
From BBC ● Mar. 21, 2025
How debasing it feels to beg for that macaroni noodle.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 1, 2022
It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
From "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin
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"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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