dynamic
toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

debase
in a sentence

show 146 more with this conextual meaning
  • a kind of "debased Romanesque"   (source)
    debased = degraded (reduced in purity or quality)
  • This practice was a debased version of the high-minded original, but by that time, in Sakiel-Norn, everything was for sale.†   (source)
  • It's believed that the hollows can live thousands of years, but it is a life of constant physical torment, of humiliating debasement—feeding on stray animals, living in isolation—and of insatiable hunger for the flesh of their former kin, because our blood is their only hope for salvation.†   (source)
  • They also debased their currency, undercut the universality of the iron law, and antagonized the Adem.†   (source)
  • The first night that he waited for Nigromanta to come to the shadows of the almond trees it seemed like an eternity, pricked as he was by the needles of uncertainty and clutching in his fist the peso and fifty cents that he had asked Amaranta Ursula for, not so much because he needed it as to involve her, debase her, prostitute her in his adventure in some way.†   (source)
  • Everest, the purists sniffed, had been debased and profaned.†   (source)
  • Well, maybe there's something in everybody that likes to be debased, but I don't think life's that simple.†   (source)
  • Many of these myths were created by great storytellers centuries ago, and it is inevitable that in the hands of common people they get debased.†   (source)
  • The bulldog fed, J. Edgar Hoover, the Law's debased saint, hyperlinked at last to Sister Edgar—a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information.†   (source)
  • I know he's capable of completely debasing another human being.†   (source)
  • He debases and humiliates them after death to show his disgust and his superiority.†   (source)
  • Although the role of chief was a venerable and esteemed one, it had, even seventy-five years ago, become debased by the control of an unsympathetic white government.†   (source)
  • To do business with the godless is to debase the work of the Lord!†   (source)
  • They can defend their rights more easily than the debased subjects of a tyrant can rescue their rights from their oppressors.†   (source)
  • He removed the needle and stared at it, expecting something grey or green, the colors of debasement.†   (source)
  • His complexion was oily and barnacled with pimples, as though his very flesh was marked with his cunning debasement.†   (source)
  • The payment of our government's debts—even to the "bloated bondholders" of Wall Street—in a debased, inflated currency, as the Bland Bill encouraged and the accompanying Matthews Resolution specifically provided, was an ethical wrong and a practical mistake, he felt, certain to embarrass our standing in the eyes of the world, and promoted not as a permanent financial program but as a spurious relief bill to alleviate the nation's economic distress.†   (source)
  • Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn't debase herself like that.†   (source)
  • Tell my queen she's debasing the old myths created by superior storytellers centuries ago.†   (source)
  • I mean—did something in her like it, did she like to be—debased?†   (source)
  • "My mother never debased anything in her entire life," I said hotly.†   (source)
  • He was unclean and he wore the odor of urine like some debased cologne.†   (source)
  • The four of you together might be enough to finally shift old Malthus out of the debased form he's been stuck in so long.†   (source)
  • This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose.†   (source)
  • And yet, if my best reason for staying in peculiardom didn't want me anymore, I wouldn't debase myself by clinging to her.†   (source)
  • Hearing "civilized" languages debase humans, watching cultural exorcisms debase literature, seeing oneself preserved in the amber of disqualifying metaphors—I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was thirty years ago.†   (source)
  • Instead, if he only might leave office unless reelected, and if he wants to be reelected, his wishes, conspiring with his fears, would tend still more powerfully to corrupt his integrity or debase his fortitude.†   (source)
  • Slaves are people debased by servitude below the equal level of free people; the Constitution regards the slave as divested of 2/5 of the man.†   (source)
  • They all looked the same to me, a race of bald, timorous zombies chanting a debased, newly minted language in a country alive with cruelty.†   (source)
  • They had debased me, lessened me, and I had left something of irreplaceable value out there with the pack.†   (source)
  • The mother had the sneering hauteur and debased professionalism of a woman who had known the more bestial instincts of men for too long.†   (source)
  • The second poem was an evocation of spring, a highly original topic, rare among young poets, and the conclusion any fair-minded reader might draw from scanning those twelve meager lines was that if I had really appreciated springtime I would never have debased its memory with that poem.†   (source)
  • Fairly or unfairly, to her derogators Pittman epitomized all that was reprehensible about Dick Bass's Popularization of the Seven Summits and the ensuing debasement of the world's highest mountain.†   (source)
  • He associated the act with the humiliation and the debasement of one male by another, the inferior male of less importance than the crumpled, cast-off handkerchief; but he did not feel this way toward Eric; and therefore he did not know what he felt.†   (source)
  • Or, to talk like the opponents of the Constitution, will it encourage the elevation of the "wealthy and the well-born" to the exclusion and debasement of all the rest of society?†   (source)
  • When they called for Bobby Bentley, it was as though they were calling to all of us, and our commitment to him deepened as we witnessed his debasement and his loneliness.†   (source)
  • It's interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves.†   (source)
  • I shall be debased and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity.†   (source)
  • The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient.†   (source)
  • But in the presence of whites he would play the role of a clown of the most debased and degraded type.†   (source)
  • His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.†   (source)
  • As Shakespeare is debased in outlook, slipshod in execution and incapable of being sincere even for a moment, he obviously stands condemned.†   (source)
  • Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility.†   (source)
  • She always sat, and wore a shawl and had to me a faint, obliterated, debased likeness to Granny; whose face was elongated too, but she wore a very soft shawl, like tapioca pudding, over her head, and it was fastened by an amethyst brooch set in pearls.†   (source)
  • How could she, Ellen's daughter, with her upbringing, have sat there and listened to such debasing words and then made such a shameless reply?†   (source)
  • They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear—something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same.†   (source)
  • After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer's, a presage of doom.†   (source)
  • I would sit listening for hours, wondering how on earth they could laugh so freely, trying to grasp the miracle that gave their debased lives the semblance of a human existence.†   (source)
  • Even speech was for them a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.†   (source)
  • Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage.†   (source)
  • BILL [cynically, aside to Barbara, his voice and accent horribly debased] Wot prawce Selvytion nah?†   (source)
  • Yes, that's the d'Urberville nose and chin—a little debased.†   (source)
  • But, even in her debased condition, she was not the person to hang about.†   (source)
  • what misery, what wretchedness is that of the man who is alone and disdains debasing liaisons!†   (source)
  • Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.†   (source)
  • POET
    You do not feel, how such a trade debases;
    How ill it suits the Artist, proud and true!†   (source)
  • 'Of some debased kind,' the other answered.†   (source)
  • A debasing war, in short, in which the Bank of France could be read in the folds of the flag.†   (source)
  • "A galley"—he checked the debasing word, and looked around, for once in his life at loss.†   (source)
  • War debases the moral force of a man, but nothing like what you'll experience here the next few years.†   (source)
  • Arthur's people were of course poor material for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy; and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short work of that law which the king had just been administering if it had been submitted to their full and free vote.†   (source)
  • du Bois, the Hippodrome, he could feel (dissembled there, by virtue of that temporal superfluity which, after the most detailed account of how a day has been spent, always leaves something over, that may serve as a hiding place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the insinuation of a possible undercurrent of falsehood which debased for him all that had remained most precious, his happiest evenings, the Rue La Perouse itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours than those of which she told him; extending the power of the dark horror that had gripped him when he had heard her admission with regard to the Maison Doree, and, like the obscene creature†   (source)
  • Why do you debase yourself before them?†   (source)
  • Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real.†   (source)
  • Then he gave way to ungovernable rage, and cursed Shefford as a religious fanatic might have cursed the most debased sinners.†   (source)
  • Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilating of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels.†   (source)
  • But so weary and confused and debased and miserable that at the sight of the outer steel jail door swinging open to receive him, he actually gave vent to a sigh of relief because of the protection it afforded.†   (source)
  • His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him.†   (source)
  • Long had Tom Doan felt the encroachment of a mood he had at one time striven against—a morbid estimate of self, a consciousness that this carnage would debase him utterly if he did not soon abandon it.†   (source)
  • You have been brought up to it, you plod on like beasts of burden, thinking only of the day and its pain—yet is there a man among you who can believe that such a system will continue forever—is there a man here in this audience tonight so hardened and debased that he dare rise up before me and say that he believes it can continue forever; that the product of the labor of society, the means of existence of the human race, will always belong to idlers and parasites, to be spent for the gratification of vanity and lust—to be spent for any purpose whatever, to be at the disposal of any individual wil†   (source)
  • And now just imagine, my good engineer, and you my fine lieutenant, what I, the son of such a father, must suffer in this damnable and barbaric place, where my body shivers with cold at the height of summer, even as my soul is constantly tortured by debasing sights.†   (source)
  • Also the artist's audience of the present was a small minority of people, all debased and vulgarized by the effort it had cost them to win in the commercial battle, of the intellectual and artistic activities which would result when the whole of mankind was set free from the nightmare of competition, we could at present form no conception whatever.†   (source)
  • But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man; and to Adam, this pale, hard-looking culprit was the Hetty who had smiled at him in the garden under the apple-tree boughs—she was that Hetty's corpse, which he had trembled to look at the first time, and then was unwilling to turn away his eyes from.†   (source)
  • Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.†   (source)
  • Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.†   (source)
  • But your cure must begin somewhere, and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with.†   (source)
  • But struggling with these better feelings was pride,—the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured.†   (source)
  • Those books, both prose and verse, are consecrated to me by other associations; and I hate to have them debased and profaned in his mouth!†   (source)
  • He could not make the request; it was debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and sell, and jarred with his conceptions of her.†   (source)
  • He had found that among muffin-sellers there existed drunkenness, debauchery, and profligacy, which he attributed to the debasing nature of their employment as at present exercised; he had found the same vices among the poorer class of people who ought to be muffin consumers; and this he attributed to the despair engendered by their being placed beyond the reach of that nutritious article, which drove them to seek a false stimulant in intoxicating liquors.†   (source)
  • He had gone away rejected and mortified—disappointed in a very sanguine hope, after a series of what appeared to him strong encouragement; and not only losing the right lady, but finding himself debased to the level of a very wrong one.†   (source)
  • But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public.†   (source)
  • The victim, from my cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to respond, I have ever been the sport and toy of debasing circumstances.†   (source)
  • And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest?†   (source)
  • For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.†   (source)
  • He was just proud enough to demand the most debasing homage of the slave, and quite servile enough to crouch, himself, at the feet of the master.†   (source)
  • the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.†   (source)
  • This may be explained by analogy; despotism debases the oppressed much more than the oppressor: in absolute monarchies the king has often great virtues, but the courtiers are invariably servile.†   (source)
  • If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased?†   (source)
  • 'Shot beyond him, I mean,' resumed Nicholas, 'in quite another respect, for, whereas he brought within the magic circle of his genius, traditions peculiarly adapted for his purpose, and turned familiar things into constellations which should enlighten the world for ages, you drag within the magic circle of your dulness, subjects not at all adapted to the purposes of the stage, and debase as he exalted.†   (source)
  • They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,—the Abaisse,— the debased,—that is to say, the people.†   (source)
  • The reflections of Sir Mulberry Hawk—if such a term can be applied to the thoughts of the systematic and calculating man of dissipation, whose joys, regrets, pains, and pleasures, are all of self, and who would seem to retain nothing of the intellectual faculty but the power to debase himself, and to degrade the very nature whose outward semblance he wears—the reflections of Sir Mulberry Hawk turned upon Kate Nickleby, and were, in brief, that she was undoubtedly handsome; that her coyness MUST be easily conquerable by a man of his address and experience, and that the pursuit was one which could not fail to redound to his credit, and greatly to enhance his reputation with the world.†   (source)
  • Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced to the state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearly always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them from falling amiss.†   (source)
  • Legree had told them, at first, that he had bought him for a general overseer, in his absence; and this had begun an ill will, on their part, which had increased, in their debased and servile natures, as they saw him becoming obnoxious to their master's displeasure.†   (source)
  • The only means of preventing men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the surest method of debasing them.†   (source)
  • I speak not of the dull brutes whose round it is to slave for slaves—the debased in blood and image—the dead in spirit; but of such as mine here—the kings of their kind; of a lineage reaching back to the broods of the first Pharaoh; my comrades and friends, dwellers in tents, whom long association with me has brought up to my plane; who to their instincts have added our wits and to their senses joined our souls, until they feel all we know of ambition, love, hate, and contempt; in war, heroes; in trust, faithful as women.†   (source)
  • The man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he obeys the mandate of one who possesses that right of authority which he acknowledges in a fellow-creature, he rises in some measure above the person who delivers the command.†   (source)
  • No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization, bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the benevolence of the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine had set were tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products were debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished, for lack of orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy arrived.†   (source)
  • But, as time, and debasing influences, and despair, hardened womanhood within her, and waked the fires of fiercer passions, she had become in a measure his mistress, and he alternately tyrannized over and dreaded her.†   (source)
  • to abolish slavery, and to efface all vestiges of it amongst the moderns than it was amongst the ancients—In the United States the prejudices of the Whites against the Blacks seem to increase in proportion as slavery is abolished—Situation of the Negroes in the Northern and Southern States—Why the Americans abolish slavery—Servitude, which debases the slave, impoverishes the master—Contrast between the left and the right bank of the Ohio—To what attributable—The Black race, as well as slavery, recedes towards the South—Explanation of this fact—Difficulties attendant upon the abolition of slavery in the South—Dangers to come—General anxiety—Foundation of a Black colony in Africa—Why th†   (source)
  • Here is a whole class,—debased, uneducated, indolent, provoking,—put, without any sort of terms or conditions, entirely into the hands of such people as the majority in our world are; people who have neither consideration nor self-control, who haven't even an enlightened regard to their own interest,—for that's the case with the largest half of mankind.†   (source)
  • The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to look upon as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise.†   (source)
  • It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.†   (source)
  • When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside—at a city charity affair which all had to attend—and reproached him for what they called his debasement of the public taste.†   (source)
  • The result has been a further debasement of the drama-Tolstoy is careful to include his own plays when condemning the contemporary stage-and a further corruption of the prevailing moral outlook.†   (source)
  • Into such deep debasement, O brethren, the sons of the Aryan fell!†   (source)
  • I know few things more affecting than that timorous debasement and self-humiliation of a woman.†   (source)
  • The result is a far more extensive debasement of the characters of citizens.†   (source)
  • Illness is, rather, a debasement—indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself.†   (source)
  • In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensationa†   (source)
  • Love of Milly abided, and that alone saved him from the utter debasement of hard life at a hard time.†   (source)
  • A human being who lives as an invalid is only a body, and that is the most inhuman of debasements—in most cases, he is no better than a cadaver.†   (source)
  • You know yourself, of course, that the only intellectual protest against nature that can be called honorable is one that keeps in mind the dignity and beauty of man and never one that, even if it does not aim at man's degradation and debasement, nevertheless accomplishes just that.†   (source)
  • "You will," Settembrini insisted, "level that charge quite in vain, simply because in due time, noble humanistic pride comes to see the tie that binds the mind to the physical body, to nature, as a debasement and a curse.†   (source)
  • Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye, and to the thought.†   (source)
  • We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain, — the impalpable principle of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; perhaps again to be communicated to some being higher than man — perhaps to pass through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten to the seraph!†   (source)
  • Such a debasement on his!†   (source)
  • Nor is this all; we scarcely acknowledge the common features of mankind in this child of debasement whom slavery has brought amongst us.†   (source)
  • There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equalled by their ignorance and their debasement, whilst in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfils all the outward duties of religious fervor.†   (source)
  • Equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to himself, he learns, with his first notions of existence, that he is the property of another, who has an interest in preserving his life, and that the care of it does not devolve upon himself; even the power of thought appears to him a useless gift of Providence, and he quietly enjoys the privileges of his debasement.†   (source)
  • To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine's life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character.†   (source)
  • To all this conversation Don Quixote was listening very attentively, and sitting up in bed as well as he could, and taking the hostess by the hand he said to her, "Believe me, fair lady, you may call yourself fortunate in having in this castle of yours sheltered my person, which is such that if I do not myself praise it, it is because of what is commonly said, that self-praise debaseth; but my squire will inform you who I am.†   (source)
    standard suffix: Today, the suffix "-th" is replaced by "-s", so that where they said "She debaseth" in older English, today we say "She debases."
  • Another example of debased German is offered by the American /Kriss Kringle/.†   (source)
  • e./, a mixture, much debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate.†   (source)
  • Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English.†   (source)
  • Not only do the present lords of the soil debase them in speaking them; in many cases they are formally displaced by native names of the utmost harshness and banality.†   (source)
  • These scientists, of course, overlook the plain fact that slang, like the folk-song, is not the creation of people in the mass, but of definite individuals, and that its character /as/ slang depends entirely upon its adoption by the ignorant, who use its novelties too assiduously and with too little imagination, and so debase them to the estate of worn-out coins, smooth and valueless.†   (source)
  • /Nix/ and /nixy/, for /no/, are debased forms of the German /nichts/; /aber nit/, once as popular as /camouflage/, is obviously /aber nicht/.†   (source)
  • The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155] Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets.†   (source)
  • I frequently hear whole narratives in a sort of debased present: "I /says/ to him....Then he /ups/ and /says/....I /land/ him one on the ear....He /goes/ down and out, ..." and so on.†   (source)
  • Sweet and Lounsbury, following the German grammarians, argue that this /em/ is not really a debased form of /them/, but the offspring of /hem/, which survived as the regular plural of the third person in the objective case down to the beginning of the fifteenth century.†   (source)
  • There is scarcely a merchant ship-captain on deep water, of whatever nationality, who does not find some acquaintance with it necessary, and it has become, in debased forms, the /lingua franca/ of Oceanica and the Far East generally.†   (source)
  • It retains the general forms of American, but in the short conversation, embracing but 41 different words, there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (/hola/, /amigo/, /porque/, /ese/, /señorita/, /lavandera/, /cuanto/ and /paseo/), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (/spera/ for /espera/ and /no kerry/ for /no quiro/), two loan-words from the Taglog (/komusta/ and /kayo/), two from Pigeon English (/chow/ and /chit/), one Philippine-American localism (/conant/), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (/hablaing/).†   (source)
  • Among the former, /Reiger/ was debased to /Riker/, /Van de Veer/ to /Vandiver/, /Van Huys/ to /Vannice/, /Van Siegel/ to /Van Sickle/, /Van Arsdale/ to /Vannersdale/, and /Haerlen/ (or /Haerlem/) to /Harlan/;[12] among the latter, /Petit/ became /Poteet/, /Caillé/ changed to /Kyle/, /De la Haye/ to /Dillehay/, /Dejean/ to /Deshong/, /Guizot/ to /Gossett/, /Guereant/ to /Caron/, /Soule/ to /Sewell/, /Gervaise/ to /Jarvis/, /Bayle/ to /Bailey/, /Fontaine/ to /Fountain/, /Denis/ to /Denny/, /Pebaudière/ to /Peabody/, /Bon Pas/ to /Bumpus/ and /de l'Hôtel/ to /Doolittle/.†   (source)
  • I durst make no return to this malicious insinuation, which debased human understanding below the sagacity of a common hound, who has judgment enough to distinguish and follow the cry of the ablest dog in the pack, without being ever mistaken.†   (source)
  • Meantime proceed to fill the people's ears With false reports, their minds with panic fears: Extol the strength of a twice-conquer'd race; Our foes encourage, and our friends debase.†   (source)
  • If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.†   (source)
  • Can thus
    The image of God in Man, created once
    So goodly and erect, though faulty since,
    To such unsightly sufferings be debased
    Under inhuman pains?†   (source)
  • These have no hope of death; and their blind life is so debased, that they are envious of every other lot.†   (source)
  • There are men of low rank who strain themselves to bursting to pass for gentlemen, and high gentlemen who, one would fancy, were dying to pass for men of low rank; the former raise themselves by their ambition or by their virtues, the latter debase themselves by their lack of spirit or by their vices; and one has need of experience and discernment to distinguish these two kinds of gentlemen, so much alike in name and so different in conduct.†   (source)
  • If the case should only be, that he MIGHT lay it down, unless continued by a new choice, and if he should be desirous of being continued, his wishes, conspiring with his fears, would tend still more powerfully to corrupt his integrity, or debase his fortitude.†   (source)
  • Do not by deserting me let my shame become the talk of the gossips in the streets; make not the old age of my parents miserable; for the loyal services they as faithful vassals have ever rendered thine are not deserving of such a return; and if thou thinkest it will debase thy blood to mingle it with mine, reflect that there is little or no nobility in the world that has not travelled the same road, and that in illustrious lineages it is not the woman's blood that is of account; and, moreover, that true nobility consists in virtue, and if thou art wanting in that, refusing me what in justice thou owest me, then even I have higher claims to nobility than thine.†   (source)
  • Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors.†   (source)
  • Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the SLAVE as divested of two fifths of the MAN.†   (source)
  • Both forms represent a doubling of inflections, and hence grammatical debasement.†   (source)
  • Or, to speak in the fashionable language of the adversaries to the Constitution, will it court the elevation of "the wealthy and the well-born," to the exclusion and debasement of all the rest of the society?†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)