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

He has done nothing to deprave morals, which is more than can be said of some French art.

From Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous by Sarah K. Bolton

I. The conflicting evidence, in consequence of hard swearing, prompted by gold-thirst, the most horrible demon that depraves the human heart, even a naturally honest heart.—II.

From The Eureka Stockade by Raffaello Carboni

Halleck had come home in broken health, and had promised his family, with the self-contempt that depraves, not to go away again, since the change had done him no good.

From A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells

As to real gallantry, the French style depraves the minds of men least, ours is most favorable to the peace of families.

From The History of Emily Montague by Frances Brooke

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

From Mysteries of Paris, V3 by Eugène Sue

For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease.

From The Function of the Poet and Other Essays by James Russell Lowell

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

Yet its parties, even at their most decadent and depraved, were never quite cool.

From Slate ● Mar. 30, 2026

But even people who are really depraved have something they love, he says.

From BBC ● Mar. 7, 2026

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2026

Nately reacted on sight with bristling enmity to this wicked, depraved and unpatriotic old man who was old enough to remind him of his father and who made disparaging jokes about America.

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller

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

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

In the resulting degradation the woman has the largest share, since it makes her a pariah and involves her in all the hardening and depraving influences of social ostracism.

From Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 Sex in Relation to Society by Havelock Ellis

No one can fail to recognise the depraving influence of a corrupt imagination; and the corruption may spring, not only from suggestions from without, but from those which rise spontaneously in our minds.

From The Map of Life Conduct and Character by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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