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

I know them, yea, And what they weigh even to the utmost scruple; Scrambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys, That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander.

From St. Winifred's, or The World of School by H. C. (Harold C.) Earnshaw

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

Yes; for it is shown that, instead of correcting him, your penitentiary system depraves.

From Mysteries of Paris, V3 by Eugène Sue

It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it.

From Là-bas by Keene Wallace

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

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

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

He seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved.

From Salon ● Jul. 17, 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

“My pubescent nemesis. What a promising day this appears to be. I am apparently to be run over by a streetcar and robbed simultaneously, thereby setting a Paradise record. Get away, you depraved urchin.”

From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole

I sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one was secured against want by the common provision, and against the degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want.

From Through the Eye of the Needle A Romance by William Dean Howells

Depravā′tion, act of depraving: state of being depraved: depravity.—adj.

From Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (part 1 of 4: A-D) 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

Too much moral anguish has a depraving effect in the long run.”

From Robert Orange Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes

It is needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness.

From The Expositor's Bible: Ephesians by G. G. Findlay