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Use degrade in a sentence

Definition of degrade:

  • (verb) To lower in value or social position | To reduce in quality or purity

Sentence Examples:

The obligation of reciting the office binds those in Holy Orders, even though they may be excommunicated, suspended, degraded or imprisoned.

In either case, since he has intruded here, to desecrate and degrade, I find it proper to apply a magic more material.

It is a dangerous privilege to be exercised; for, should the alloy be not of a quality which pleases the Emperor, or the particular governor of the city, the unfortunate coiner is forthwith degraded, and his property confiscated.

In her the wisdom of the dawn-goddess Athene, the loftiest of Greek divinities, becomes degraded into the art of an enchantress.

This remarkable man was Count Metternich, who more than any other man set in motion the secret springs which resulted in a general confederation to shake off the degrading fetters imposed by the French conqueror.

One black-ball sufficed to nullify his election, and that one was dropped in by George Selwyn, who, with degrading littleness, would not have the son of an actor among them.

Their canoes are more rudely constructed than in most of the other islands; and, on the whole, these people seem to be among the most degraded of the islanders of the Pacific.

She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.

Jeffrey, when he degraded both himself and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such an unprincipled blunderer as Hazlitt.

It has been asserted, too, by those who would wish the teachings of the Koran to take precedence over those of the Bible, that the position accorded to women by the Mosaic law was quite as degrading as that accorded to them by Mohammed; but a careful reading of the Scripture warrants no such conclusion.

Her imitators, even when at their best, are not her equals, and they have degraded her methods oftentimes to paltry uses.

This very paw, so strong and aristocratic, (the tufts of useless hair you see between my toes proclaim the purity of my race) this very paw bore a bluish stain for eight days and the degrading odor of rusty steel clung to it a long time after ...

Redemption was not degraded into a fine abstract argument, to which the apostle had appended his own approval, and then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, as a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of orthodoxy.

The heliocentric system, thus regarding the sun as the central orb, degraded the earth to a very subordinate rank, making her only one of a company of six revolving bodies.

I will now further prove to you the truth of my assertion concerning this degrading and demoralizing condition of affairs.

The poor woman was probably cold and glad to be covered; if she had any modesty regarding exposure of the body she could have learned it from no one but the dreadful, degraded whites, for the Australian himself is an utter stranger to such a feeling.

You cheapen and degrade yourself, and you bring shame upon your brother and me by your disgraceful affair with this ruffian.

The marks of service cannot be more degrading than service itself; and it is the mere chicane of philosophy to extend reform only to cuffs and collars, while we do not dispense with the services annexed to them.

He could not stand in the street and beg for clients, or drag men forcibly into his chambers and compel them to be clients; and he would not degrade the dignity of his calling by advertising for clients, or taking any means whatever to get them, except by establishing a reputation for professional learning and integrity.

His poetic nature, like the indwelling fire of the world, was ever ready to play havoc with induration and constriction, and the same moment when degrading influences ceased to operate, the delicacy of his feeling began to revive.

I think that an epithet, which, much and senselessly as it has been misapplied and degraded, is yet, when rightly used, perhaps the grandest that can be applied to a human being, was especially applicable to him.

Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste.

From the first moment of our encountering it had been my well-intentioned purpose that loyal confidence should be strengthened and rebellion cowed by submitting this opportune but otherwise inoffensive stranger to a sordid and degrading end.

Old men and old women, young men and young women, children, infants in arms, all crowded into foul tenements, with not sufficient food, impure air, and improper clothing; and everything tending to degrade their morals.

The priests had told the Indians that in the outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that only the degraded and debased spoke English.

He kept the ideas of self and of others inseparably knit together in one complex association: he did not expel or degrade either, in order to give exclusive ascendancy to the other.

I am fully aware that so much has the little national pride and national character created by the war of 1812 degenerated, that more of this class will forgive the treason to the institutions, on account of their hatred of the rights of the mass, than will feel that the republic is degraded by the course and practices of which I complain.

Yet recently the humiliating spectacle has been repeatedly presented of expert swearing against expert, until the question at issue was apparently degraded into one of personal feeling or of professional reputation.

Let not one who desires to reform be compelled to associate with those who are almost sure to degrade and debase him.

My uncle having known Wynne when quite a young man, before intemperance had degraded him, took an interest in him still.

And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert.

Yes, he was caught and chained at last, and for the next week had moods of gnashing his teeth, and feeling the most degraded of men, alternating with hours of trying to persuade himself that it was the best thing which could have happened to him.

And it is not, unfortunately, altogether unnecessary to insist that, so far from enhancing the value of an artist's work, we only degrade it into mere means, subordinate it to uses alien, and therefore antagonistic to its perfection, if we try to show that it gives pleasure, or refinement, or moral culture.

Now sensuality and sexual desire are considered as rather vulgar, and a little dirty, even ridiculous and degrading, not to say bestial.

A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment.

The frosts and damps of winter, and the heats of summer, had warped what wreck remained, so that not a post or a board retained the position it was meant to hold, but everything was twisted from its purpose, like its owner, and degraded and debased.

Where is the fitness, then, of replying to those who urge upon the House the topics of duty and policy that they attempt to force the treaty down, and to compel this assembly to renounce its discretion, and to degrade itself to the rank of a blind and passive instrument in the hands of the treaty-making power?

The narrative degrades and brutalizes the widowed heroine's affection for her second husband to the actual level of the vile conception which the poet attributes and confines to the foul imagination of her envious and murderous brothers.

In this temper of mind he summoned them to Westminster, and required their consent that, for the future, whenever a clergyman had been degraded for a public crime by the sentence of the spiritual judge, he should be immediately delivered into the custody of a lay officer to be punished by the sentence of a lay tribunal.

The old man's solution was clear enough now: he believed no less than that out of that infinitely mysterious void that lies beyond the veils of sense there had come a Personality, strong, malignant, degraded, and seeking to degrade, seizing upon this lad's soul, in the disguise of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it.

Further, since righteousness alone can raise men above the level of humanity, it must needs be that unrighteousness degrades below man's level those whom it has cast out of man's estate.

The energy of the average Englishman, on the other hand, is impaired by his complacent acceptance of positions of social inferiority and by his worship of degrading social distinctions; and even successful Englishmen suffer from a similar handicap.

It is remarkable enough, that although the female part of the society is highly respected, yet, in one instance, a distinction is kept up, which in civilized countries would be deemed degrading.

The eldest degraded himself by the looseness of his life and marriage, and died the inheritor of an empty title.

Feeling too degraded to speak, I took the letter in silence out of my maid's hands, and while I was in the act of locking it away in a drawer Alma came up with a telegram from my husband, saying he was leaving London by the early train the following morning and would arrive at Blackwater at half-past three in the afternoon.

It is looked upon as merely an effort to pamper one or two pets and to persecute and degrade their supposed rivals.

The ruin of Liberty overthrows all order and all police, confounds vice and virtue, authorizes every monstrous infamy, extinguishes the last spark of shame and remorse, degrades and disfigures beyond recovery the whole human race.

"I came for a child staying with you," Jasper Penny explained shortly, suppressing an involuntary repulsion at the degraded surroundings.

Its cultivators constantly make up for lack of talent by the excitement of immoral scenes, and give to their audience of sempstresses and grooms a most degraded view of aristocratic life.

For this reason education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are carefully limited, sound political development is sternly frowned upon, and industry is degraded and changed to the demands of European markets.

In the first place, it is to be noted that in countries where woman is conspicuously degraded the dance is correspondingly depraved.

Every person in your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honor, is disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except in a mortified and humiliated indignation.

It was not to be expected that any one of those degraded beings could have influence enough to settle any part of the terms in favor of the candidates for further degradation; besides, such intervention would be a direct breach in their system, which did not permit one sovereign power to utter a word in the concerns of his equal.

And as she thought of her riches in these first days of her desertion, as she had indeed been thinking since Cecilia Burton had been with her, she came to understand that she was degraded by their acquisition.

One evening, being unable to settle his bill at his color shop, the painter had exclaimed that he would live upon the capital of his income rather than lower himself to the degrading production of trade pictures.

This is not indigence; that state which, however dignified the man of genius himself may be, must inevitably degrade!

When a band of pregnant women came to their master to implore relief from overwork, he seemed "positively degraded" to his wife, as he stood urging them to do their allotted tasks.

The salts in the ocean are undoubtedly derived from the rocks; increasing age by age as the latter are degraded from their original character under the action of the weather, etc., and converted to the sedimentary form.

The English degraded their Celtic serfs to their own barbaric level; and the very memory of Roman civilization almost died out of the land for a hundred and fifty years.

At eight or ten years old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm type, degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen.

And we know that this is the true method, because there is nothing which exercises an influence so strong to uplift and purify as the feeling of our kinship with the life above us, and that we are degrading our life when we forget this or ignore it.

Brutalized, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle for industrial supremacy which economists declare has already begun.

This jealousy does not degrade its object; it may hate, proscribe, and kill, but it is nevertheless mingled with the fanaticism of admiration, and encourages genius, even in persecuting it.

It was a degrading attitude, and the presence of the girls made the punishment a disgrace to rankle and burn.

He sulked at the enormous offensiveness of men, things, and events; of words and even of glances which he seemed to feel physically resting on his skin like a pain, like a degrading contact.

It must seem very degrading to find themselves laid out upon a bed of cinders and moss, hung up by the heels above it, and even planted therein; but if they have as much good sense as some believe, they may be aware that it is all for their good.

Thus, reduced to immobility, and unable to help himself, the baron had been obliged to witness a degrading scene, where his wife caressed a Frenchman, and thus outraged conjugal fidelity and German honor at the same time.

The rum habit worked its heavy chains upon him before he was well aware that his life had begun in earnest; and when he realized that he was in possession of his full manhood, and that the prime of life was not far off, he found himself chained hand and foot, toiling heavily in the most degrading servitude.

It was plainly perceptible in his most radical propositions, that however he might wish to renew social order he would not corrupt its elements, and that his eyes to emancipate the people was not to degrade them.

The first night they tapped at the door to our cellar, and, peeping through the cracks, we saw a number of these degraded specimens of German humanity in their night attire.

He well knew that splendor of coloring and brilliancy of tints would ill accord with the solidity and simplicity of effect so essential to heroic subjects, and that the sublime and majestic would be degraded by a union with the florid and the gay.

I have little literary ability and less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of letters known as fiction.

It has become the substratum for that factor, and the factor has been degraded into an attribute of the entity.

Slavery, by forced and artificial means, propagates society from its lowest and most degraded class, from a race of barbarians held within its bosom from generation to generation, without being permitted to share its civilizing influences.

Be his better example, father, for I hope to see you influence him to be kind to me, and the sight of you walking downward in his view will degrade me more than bearing his name or sharing his eccentricities.

The way the subject presents itself to me is, that it is degrading to have sex determine everything for us: our employments, our position in society, the obedience we owe to others, the influence we are permitted to exercise, all and everything to be dependent upon the delicate matter of a merely physical function.

He feared lest, influenced by the hard and degrading circumstances in which she was placed on the journey, she should again get into that state of despair and discord with her own self which formerly made her irritable with him, and which had caused her to drink and smoke excessively to gain oblivion.

We must develop in ourselves a moral tidiness, and an aversion to all the manifestations of the brute principle in man, such as the wolfish, degrading hatred for people of other races.

She had gained a sudden insight into the treacherous, lying arts of degraded women; the wiles of coquetry, the revolting cunning which arouses such profound hatred in men at the mere suspicion of innate corruption in a woman.

Further, it is necessary for the production of stable beer to eliminate a large proportion of nitrogenous matter, and this is only done by the yeast when the proteins are degraded.

The gentleman who threw out this tentative proposition remarked that in his opinion the acceptance of this position by an ex-President "instead of degrading the individual would elevate the representative character."

It was going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrading by a strange, anxious whine the sonority of the Spanish language, which he pattered rapidly, like some sort of cringing jargon.

A religion that seeks to make the people satisfied in their degraded conditions, and releases them from all responsibility for its continuance, is unworthy our intelligent belief, and a government that holds half its people in slavery, practically chained where they are born, in ignorance, poverty, and vice, is unworthy our intelligent support.

Frank learned that he had been degraded for the destruction of the Zeppelins, for which he had been held responsible.

The remains of these cities sufficiently attest the former amount of population and the comparative civilization which existed at that remote era among the progenitors of the present degraded race of barbarians.

Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.

Hasty and incomplete observations and inductions are prejudicial enough to physical science, but when their effect is to degrade untruthfully our common humanity, there is an additional motive to regret them.

The coarse reality is so shocking and degrading, so repugnant to taste and good feeling, and all their preconceived notions upon the subject, that they cannot indulge in it without remorse and a painful sense of degradation.

An American original, unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization

Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of those unfortunate beings, not reflecting that that degradation was very much the work of themselves and their fathers, few minds have yet doubted but that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses and cattle.

Not content with punishment, which is in itself erroneous and an infringement of social justice, they even degrade the minds of the boys still more by applying punishment to the most degraded part, adding contumely to tyranny.

He had become a confirmed debauchee, in the hands of a degraded clique, whose only contribution to the crisis was a suggested issue of paper money and debasement of the popular coinage.

Yet it is nevertheless true that so long as a girl is not to know how to take care of herself, not to know the function of the most important part of her life, we need not be surprised if she becomes an easy prey to prostitution, or to any other form of a relationship which degrades her to the position of an object for mere sex gratification.

Mere suppression and barbaric enactments can serve but to embitter, and further degrade, the unfortunate victims of ignorance and stupidity.

Congratulating himself, therefore, on the whole, on escaping from what he regarded as a degrading servitude, he walked up to the desk in a dignified manner, and received the wages due him.

He was now degraded below the level even of the hirelings whom the government employed in the most infamous offices.

Suppose that the member who sits for a nomination borough owes his seat to a man of virtue and honor, to a man whose service is perfect freedom, to a man who would think himself degraded by any proof of gratitude which might degrade his nominee.

The greater number of these old tunes are, without question, of an excellence which sets them above either the enhancement or the ruin of Time, and at present when so much attention is given to music it is to be desired that such masterpieces should not be hidden away from the public, or only put forth in a corrupt and degraded form.

For law has no power to punish us for the vices which debilitate our constitution, destroy our substance, or degrade our character.

A few white officials and storekeepers, too slack even to be sick of their surroundings, and a few degraded families of Bushmen of uninteresting habits and extremely filthy, constituted the inhabitants.