Sample sentences for DEGRADE - verbalworkout.com

2 meanings

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1 —as in:
her comments were degrading

Definition

reducing human dignity

She felt degraded by the way he delivered the criticism.

degraded = reducing human dignity

Other Uses (with this meaning)

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill
We degrade God when we attribute our own ideas to Him, out of annoyance that we cannot fathom His ways.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor -- The Idiot
No, sir—nothing shall ever induce me to degrade this honorable estate to such pitiful conditions
Cooper, James Fenimore -- Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief
Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo -- Essays, Second Series
If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices.
Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World

degraded = reduced in human dignity

To think I should have lived to be leading such a life, and be degraded down into such company.
Mark Twain -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

degraded = reduced in human dignity

The reins, the halters, the blinkers, the degrading nosebags, were thrown on to the rubbish fire which was burning in the yard.
George Orwell -- Animal Farm

degrading = reducing dignity

I couldn't tell him that the reason I couldn't return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life.
Tara Westover -- Educated

degrading = reducing dignity

A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there.
George Orwell -- 1984

degradation = reduction of human dignity

(editor's note: The suffix "-tion", converts a verb into a noun that denotes the action or result of the verb. Typically, there is a slight change in the ending of the root verb, as in action, education, and observation.)

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2 —as in:
degraded the quality

Definition

to decrease the value of something

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Booker T. Washington

Other Uses (with this meaning)

The factory degrades local air quality.

degrades = decreases the value of something

And do you think you can injure and degrade yourself, and I not feel it?
Bronte, Anne -- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Such praise coming from so degraded a source, was degrading to me, its recipient.
Cicero
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
There is scarcely anything that can wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation which we do not experience.
Alexander Hamilton -- Federalist Papers
No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Charles Dickens -- A Christmas Carol

degradation = decrease in quality

I wished we did not have to degrade the house with our modern jig-tunes, so out-of-place and unromantic.
Daphne du Maurier -- Rebecca

degrade = decrease the value of

I have no position to lose, and no name to degrade.
Collins, Wilkie -- No Name

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