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

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

The legal definition of obscenity in Great Britain is that which tends "to deprave and corrupt."

From Time Magazine Archive

Their malice makes them nimble-eyed, apt to note a fault and publish it, and, with a strained construction, to deprave even those things in which the doer's intents were honest.

From Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by Albert Pike

Thus the host of Moumouth became his tyrant; so true is it that personal interest depraves the best natures.

From The Story of a Cat by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

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 depraves morals and corrupts the family, and as long as it exists, it carries the brand of barbarism.

From The Awakening of China by W. A. P. (William Alexander Parsons) Martin

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

From The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France

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

“I apologize to all who were hurt by this clearly terrible and depraved individual.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2026

In actuality, “The Housemaid” is about as depraved and delicious as a mainstream film can get, packed with narrative twists and guffaw-worthy choices from everyone involved.

From Salon ● Jan. 31, 2026

“Mind you return anything you have borrowed to the correct — what have you been doing to that book, you depraved boy?”

From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling

Item, that she rails on men in authority, depraving their honours with bitter jests and taunts; and that she's a backbiter, setting strife betwixt bosom friends.

From A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 9 by Various

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

If affection lead a man to favor the less worthy in desert, let him do it, without depraving or disabling the better deserver.

From The Essays of Francis Bacon by Francis Bacon

That by a perpetual miracle, Sacred Manuscripts would be protected all down the ages against depraving influences of whatever sort,—was not to have been expected; certainly, was never promised.

From The Revision Revised by John William Burgon

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