toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

degrade
in a sentence
grouped by contextual meaning

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • 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.   (source)
    degrading = reducing dignity
  • I learned that he had kept his family on welfare and had never held a job in the U.S., preferring to cash government-issued checks than degrading himself with work unsuitable for a man of his stature—he saw the flea market only as a hobby, a way to socialize with his fellow Afghans.   (source)
  • Once, driven to his breaking point by a guard jabbing him, Louie yanked the stick from the guard's hands. He knew he might get killed for it, but under this unceasing degradation, something was happening to him. His will to live, resilient through all of the trials on the raft, was beginning to fray.   (source)
    degradation = reduction of human dignity
  • The practice, which wasn't declared unconstitutional until 2002, was one of many degrading and dangerous punishments imposed on incarcerated people.   (source)
    degrading = reducing human dignity
  • I felt so degraded; I cried like a baby.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in human dignity
  • Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition.   (source)
    degrading = reducing in human dignity
  • "Disgraceful, degrading, disgusting," she said.   (source)
  • Without taxes, it must give up its independence and sink into the degraded condition of a province.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in dignity
  • Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation—not of myself but of all men who were black like me.   (source)
    degradation = reduction of human 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.   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 32 more with this conextual meaning
  • If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in human dignity
  • I would permit no man ... to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.   (source)
    degrade = reduce (my) human dignity
  • To think I should have lived to be leading such a life, and be degraded down into such company.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in human dignity
  • ...it was a source of pride to her that I had not degraded myself, like most of the slaves.   (source)
    degraded = reduced (my) human dignity
  • I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in dignity (made less worthy of admiration)
  • That Miss Crawford should endeavour to secure a meeting between him and Mrs. Rushworth, was all in her worst line of conduct, and grossly unkind and ill-judged; but she hoped he would not be actuated by any such degrading curiosity.   (source)
    degrading = reducing human dignity
  • Prisoners reported that they were still being beaten by correctional staff and subjected to humiliation in stockades and other degrading punishments.   (source)
    degrading = reducing in human dignity
  • She read in his face that it had been a place of abasement, of degradation and despair.   (source)
    degradation = reduction of human dignity
  • In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.   (source)
    degradation = reduction in dignity
  • And in a place predicated on degradation, stealing from the enemy won back the men's dignity.   (source)
  • In prison camp, Watanabe had forced him to live in incomprehensible degradation and violence.   (source)
    degradation = reduced dignity
  • You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated or deceived.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in human dignity
  • I felt so degraded as I stripped in front of the counselor during my in-processing, spread my butt cheeks before I showered, then put on the stale-smelling "county clothes."   (source)
  • The work was nauseating and degrading, and when heavy rains came, the waste oozed out of the cesspits and back into camp.   (source)
    degrading = reducing dignity
  • We have experienced nearly everything that can wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation:   (source)
    degrade = reduce dignity of
  • It was degrading to have to depend so thoroughly on a person who had been educated at a state university.   (source)
    degrading = reducing in dignity
  • Major Major had bought the dark glasses and false mustache in Rome in a final, futile attempt to save himself from the swampy degradation into which he was steadily sinking.   (source)
    degradation = reduction of human dignity
  • We haven't got a stitch of clothing, and it's going to be very degrading and embarrassing for the person who has to go downstairs through the lobby to get some.   (source)
    degrading = reducing in human dignity
  • Haven't they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?   (source)
    degrade = reduce dignity of
  • It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself.   (source)
    degrading = reducing in human dignity
  • Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded.   (source)
    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.   (source)
    degrading = reducing dignity
  • Degrade him from what position?   (source)
    degrade = reduce status
  • Degrading her to so much mutton.   (source)
    degrading = reducing dignity
  • But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in dignity (made less worthy of admiration)
  • I am the lineal descendant of that infant—I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised by the cold world, ragged, worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft!   (source)
    degraded = reduced in human dignity
  • Human beings, their feelings and passions, would indeed be degraded if such a wretch as I felt pride.   (source)
    degraded = reduced in dignity (made less worthy of admiration)
  • My friend, if you had known me as I once was, you would not recognize me in this state of degradation.   (source)
    degradation = reduced dignity
  • Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured to prove to me the futility of pride.   (source)
    degradation = reduction in dignity
  • To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm.   (source)
    degradation = reduction of human dignity
  • She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor.†   (source)
  • All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.   (source)
  • Perhaps it's Werner's imagination, but each time he hears one of the programs, the quality seems to degrade a bit more, the sound growing fainter: as though the Frenchman broadcasts from a ship that is slowly traveling farther away.   (source)
    degrade = decrease in quality
  • Olmsted's health degraded and insomnia again shattered his nights.   (source)
    degraded = grew worse
  • Still, he implicitly believes that what Europe represents is degraded and decaying (and these are not the only examples).   (source)
    degraded = decreased in quality
  • It rises with increasing density, but at a certain point it peaks, begins to degrade, and eventually dies out.   (source)
    degrade = diminish (become less)
  • I wished we did not have to degrade the house with our modern jig-tunes, so out-of-place and unromantic.   (source)
    degrade = decrease the value of
  • 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.   (source)
    degradation = decrease in quality
  • Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading.   (source)
    degrading = decreasing
  • If everything went perfectly—if his health did not degrade any further, if the weather held, if Burnham completed the other buildings on time, if strikes did not destroy the fair, if the many committees and directors, which Olmsted called "that army our hundreds of masters," learned to leave Burnham alone—Olmsted might be able to complete his task on time.   (source)
    degrade = get worse
  • The fair buildings were complete and all exhibits were in place, but just as surely as silver tarnishes, the fair became subject to the inevitable forces of degradation and decline—and tragedy.   (source)
    degradation = decrease in quality
▲ show less (of above)
show 2 more with this conextual meaning
  • He and his brigade of architects, draftsmen, engineers, and contractors had accomplished so much in an impossibly short time, but apparently not enough to overcome the damping effect of the fast-degrading economy.   (source)
    degrading = getting worse
  • 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.   (source)
▲ show less (of above)

show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • And probably more than four hundred and fifty billion has already been spent on saving the environment from degradation.†   (source)
  • GRACEFUL DEGRADATION IS the problem.†   (source)
  • A newly emerging power will take over the existing symbols and degrade them over time in an attempt to erase their meaning.†   (source)
  • No whistling, catcalls, or other degrading behavior will be tolerated.†   (source)
  • Which means I have to lie to her on a daily basis, which is in itself enjoyable but a little degrading at the same time.†   (source)
  • He felt degraded.†   (source)
  • THIS IS DEGRADING!†   (source)
  • Considering that he has lived through five or six languages, five or six countries, two or three centuries of history; has seen his country, city, and family butchered, bargained with pirates and bureaucrats, eaten filth in order to stay alive; that he has survived every degradation known to this century, considering all those liabilities, isn't it amazing that he can read a Condensed and Simplified for Modern Students edition of A Tale of Two Cities?†   (source)
  • The Ecology Club is planning a rally to protest the "degrading of an endangered species."†   (source)
  • Overpopulation, leading — as we've seen in spades — to environmental degradation and poor nutrition."†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 190 more examples with any meaning
  • I leave a place of degradation and squalor, the likes of which I will never experience again.†   (source)
  • Mr. Stead, who rode his bike late at night with a flashing light on the front powered by his pedals, would never degrade the lawns of his neighbors that way.†   (source)
  • I hated when he would videotape me and him having sex or me doing some other degrading thing.†   (source)
  • "Don't cry, it's degrading," snapped Bronwyn.†   (source)
  • In sixth grade, a bunch of kids including Margo and Chuck and me were forced by our parents to take ballroom dancing lessons at the Crown School of Humiliation, Degradation, and Dance.†   (source)
  • Her only concern was to keep her wedding dress from being fouled by the degradations of her relatives and friends; but as she crossed the patio she slipped and every inch of her dress ended up coated with vomit.†   (source)
  • I'd have to begin that degrading nonsense again.†   (source)
  • Researchers knew from simulated zero-gravity studies using animals that space travel could cause cardiovascular changes, degradation of bone and muscle, and a loss of red blood cells.†   (source)
  • "Of course," said Boris, looking less and less like a person every moment, and more like some degraded piece of silver nitrate stock from the 1920s, light shining behind him from some hidden source.†   (source)
  • When one has seen the horrors of a dirty little war … as you have … or sensed the degrading immorality of CIA dollar-diplomacy intervention … as I have … a rough landing pales into insignificance.†   (source)
  • I should tell him to stop or make a sarcastic comment or at least feel degraded, but none of that happened.†   (source)
  • I danced for the 'hood, I danced for the end of degradation, I danced for all the little people who ever tried to make it and were crushed.†   (source)
  • Such degradation!†   (source)
  • There is no place [in the city] where the chaos and degradation are as pronounced.†   (source)
  • Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation!†   (source)
  • She noticed the gradual changes in the attention paid her by livid women, degraded by arthritis and resentment, who one day were convinced of the uselessness of their intrigues and appeared unannounced in the little Park of the Evangels as if it were their own home, bearing recipes and engagement gifts.†   (source)
  • It degrades everything it touches.†   (source)
  • It can communicate, but only for a little while before it starts going haywire and degrading.†   (source)
  • What she had gone through was very different from the first rape in his office; it was no longer a matter of coercion and degradation.†   (source)
  • The balance between Ma'at and Chaos will slowly degrade.†   (source)
  • It was only when they found him funny that he found it, though he did not know the word, degrading.†   (source)
  • Strange, since Patch never degraded himself The cars rolled backward, then lurched forward.†   (source)
  • To his surprise, being invisible degraded his sense of balance; without the ability to see where his hands or his feet were, he kept misjudging distances and bumping into things, almost as if he had consumed too much ale.†   (source)
  • For many minutes the scene of degradation continued until the mother yanked her daughter by the arm and pulled her out of the room.†   (source)
  • Some laughed together, the young, with dead eyes set in yellow faces, the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation.†   (source)
  • Each, I felt, was degrading, and I thought we should insist on the honorific "Mister."†   (source)
  • Degraded me all the time!†   (source)
  • "When I said I'd help distract people, I didn't think it would be this degrading."†   (source)
  • You have pauperized and degraded them, and they hate you for it.†   (source)
  • Another minor contributor to the falling homicide rate is the fact that some crack dealers took to shooting their enemies in the buttocks rather than murdering them; this method of violent insult was considered more degrading—and was obviously less severely punished—than murder.†   (source)
  • It was these simple things that were within your grasp in the degraded circumstances of life in prison; the things you could do yourself, or the small kindnesses one prisoner could extend to another.†   (source)
  • It couldn't have hurt, but there was something terribly degrading about the action.†   (source)
  • For the most part they were men for whom this degrading step had not borne fruit.†   (source)
  • But three feet allowed a big margin of error for degradation of the material.†   (source)
  • But Adam never degraded the new guys—he mentored them.†   (source)
  • "The holy men of the villages aren't supposed to degrade themselves with physical labor.†   (source)
  • I have to admit that, even in the midst of such utter degradation, I think it's funny that he can't seem to say the word bra.†   (source)
  • Each one more degrading.†   (source)
  • She would chain herself with other ladies to the gates of Congress and the Supreme Court, setting off a degrading spectacle that made all their husbands look ridiculous.†   (source)
  • Just the thought of it is disgusting and degrading and ….†   (source)
  • The scent on his clothes, on his person, was a coarse, communal odor that made me sad, because it spoke of his degradation.†   (source)
  • We are as easily degraded as any other people.†   (source)
  • There, men would gather around a radio and talk about politics and money. e>tf<")(*>t>o "Every reason which calls for the exclusion of the most wretched, ignorant, dirty, diseased and degraded people of Europe or Asia demands that the illiterate, unclean, peonized masses moving this way from Mexico be stopped at the border…." crackled a speech by a Texas congressman.†   (source)
  • Uncle thought he was simply rubbing some grease off his fingers, but in reality he was soiling himself in the squalor and degradation of our captivity--without him knowing it, or us intending it.†   (source)
  • And I was forced to the utmost degradation because I possessed skilled hands and the belief that my knowledge could bring me dignity-not wealth, only dignity-and other men health!†   (source)
  • "But even in this regiment," he noted, "there were a number of Negroes, which to persons unaccustomed to such associations had a disagreeable, degrading effect."†   (source)
  • But to be bound by the ankles in that splintery wood, under hot sun or chill drizzle, enduring hours of disapproving stares and the catcalls of unmannerly children—this, to me, was degradation more than most deserved.†   (source)
  • I detested the job, and I felt as worthless and degraded as I had when I lived with Mother.†   (source)
  • Degradation, she thinks, goes hand in hand with the certainty of deprivation.†   (source)
  • A series of memories cut off what my eyes were seeing — my Aunt Harriet's face in the water, her hair gently waving in the current; poor Anne, a limp figure hanging from a beam; Sally, wringing her hands in anguish for Katherine, and in terror for herself; Sophie, degraded to a savage, sliding in the dust, with an arrow in her neck… Any of those might have been a picture of Petra's future… I shifted over beside her, and put an arm round her.†   (source)
  • At Moat Cailin the bog devils had loosed poisoned arrows at his men, but that was to be expected from such degraded creatures.†   (source)
  • …violence that hardened ethnic prejudice and helped to beget further violence; political opportunism that took advantage of a largely uneducated population, imbued, some have said, with the habit of obedience; overpopulation, environmental degradation, and economic distress that led to competition for dwindling resources; the harmful and appalling role played by France and the criminally negligent response of the United Nations, the United States, and other Western powers, both to…†   (source)
  • A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?†   (source)
  • John McWhorter, a linguist at Stanford, entitled his latest book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care.†   (source)
  • Agee was degraded slowly, in degrees, and finally, long after he became the campus joke, he left R Company in tears.†   (source)
  • I have no interest in watching you degrade yourself.†   (source)
  • From a kind of terrible degradation no man could really understand.†   (source)
  • Let [the war] be long or short meat or no meat shoes or no shoes [we are] Resolved to fight it out …. for the sake of liberty …. if we give it up now we will certainly be the most degraded people on earth.†   (source)
  • The rest were degraded, becoming dependent.†   (source)
  • Wulfgar always remembered his rank in the mines, however, for Bruenor was often gruff and insulting, working Wulfgar at menial, sometimes degrading, tasks.†   (source)
  • It was too disgusting and degrading, and un-Collin.†   (source)
  • I haven't done a thing other than love you and try to help you through a difficult time, and I'm not going to stand here and listen to you degrade me.†   (source)
  • Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.†   (source)
  • They, somehow, prevent degradation.†   (source)
  • Though he did not know the soldier's name, this did not matter much, for the soldiers whose names he did not know he simply called Soldier or Trooper, whichever came to him first, and there was nothing impersonal or degrading about either word.†   (source)
  • Even if we have learned to be rightly and deeply fearful of elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms of any nation into normative and exclusivist systems, even if we have terrible proof that pride in an ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic, our vigilance on that score should not displace our love and trust in the good of the indigenous per se.†   (source)
  • By afternoon the law of scarcity had condemned the dollar to degradation and contempt.†   (source)
  • Where he has been degraded elsewhere by unjust men of both races, here he is resisting degradation.†   (source)
  • It was over my dead body that I let you degrade yourself by continuing to work with these charlatans, these horse doctors.†   (source)
  • I foresaw my coming degradation as I lay there on the damp straw.†   (source)
  • Until then my fantasies were brothel fantasies of conquest and degradation, with the woman as the willing victim, the accomplice in her own degradation.†   (source)
  • Insofar as we view the whole matter abstractly, nothing in the world, not even abject poverty, is more degrading and, ultimately, dehumanizing--at least in potential--than police work.†   (source)
  • Or perhaps, instead of feeding me to the pigs, be would simply have me feed the pigs and be a plaything of the pig boys—a fate merciful rather than cold justice in view of my utter degradation in returning without you.†   (source)
  • To think or speak in such terms seemed to him degrading.†   (source)
  • "I cannot degrade the Senate by engaging in slavery and disunion discussions," he said.†   (source)
  • Degrading heat," she said and added, "Doesn't matter."†   (source)
  • It's no degradation.†   (source)
  • Of course it was DISGUSTING and DEGRADING— we were sober!†   (source)
  • So I found it sheer hypocrisy for him to label Old Freddy's DISGUSTING and DEGRADING.†   (source)
  • It was like a perfume ad: foreign and dangerous and potentially degrading.†   (source)
  • Jefferson was to write of the degrading effects of the institution on both slave and master.†   (source)
  • And now look at us, how degraded we've become!†   (source)
  • My essence would be scattered and degraded.†   (source)
  • That is too degrading and humiliating—and what if I dropped my purse and it fell out?†   (source)
  • Which explains why you're traveling in the degraded style of refugees?†   (source)
  • And for a long time it has been, in truth, degraded.†   (source)
  • For that degrading need, which should never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ….†   (source)
  • By the eighteenth century, it had become a degraded people.†   (source)
  • It was crude, rude, filthy, degrading and disgusting …. like …. you know.†   (source)
  • That is one of the potential degradations.†   (source)
  • The guards, some of them, were dour and sadistic men, skilled in unusual and degrading punishments.†   (source)
  • There are people who say that Miss Florence Nightingale does not have a refined nature, or she would not have been able to witness such degrading spectacles without impairing her health.†   (source)
  • Who judges what will get men off yet not be too degrading to all the women outside the cum-room, the nurses and doctors and hopeful, hormone-addled wives?†   (source)
  • I didn't need to know the topic to know what he'd seen; for the most part, they all featured the same disgusting topics, told as luridly as possible by guests whose single goal, it seemed, was to be on television, no matter how degraded they were made to look.†   (source)
  • …writing almost exclusively about her husband's increased addiction to these events and the elaborate acts he conceived for both his wife and his wife's best friend and servant. there are virtually no entries other than these (often repugnant and degrading) until early in 1918, an editorial time jump i readily make in order to spare you, the reader, the sordid descriptions of the debauchery to which john rimbauer stooped. the only element you lose because of my red pencil is the growing…†   (source)
  • I didn't mention that I considered the whole practice of school dances degrading or that they were just giant wastes of time and money.†   (source)
  • ""As you wish," Haji Ali said, turning his back on Mehdi, to emphasize how he had degraded himself by demanding a bribe.†   (source)
  • Whenever Nasuada drank wine, mead, and especially strong spirits, she became most cautious with her speech and motions, for even if she did not notice it at once, she knew the alcohol degraded her judgment and coordination, and she had no desire to behave inappropriately or to give others an advantage in their dealings with her.†   (source)
  • They are dark and degraded pictures.†   (source)
  • He will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature, of a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man?†   (source)
  • Guenhwyvar was a hunter, not an assassin, and to use it in such a role was criminally degrading, to say nothing of the horrors that Masoj was inflicting upon the innocent gnomes.†   (source)
  • We read from the Koran in unison, participated in a question and answer session that praised Islam and degraded Christianity, and chanted afternoon prayers together.†   (source)
  • My interactions with him had grown unpleasant, as I resented the fact that I worked for the nastiest man in construction services, and he seemed to take perverse pleasure in treating me in as degrading a manner as he could devise.†   (source)
  • It's no jumping-jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions.†   (source)
  • I responded that it was always unacceptable to live in degrading conditions and that political prisoners throughouthistory had considered it part of their duty to fight to improve prison conditions.†   (source)
  • The Pogy On the Pogy, the nearest attack boat, the contact faded, degrading the directional bearing somewhat.†   (source)
  • If other groups were interested in becoming wealthy, I was to assure the Brothers and the doubting members of other districts, that we rejected wealth as corrupt and intrinsically degrading; if other minorities loved the country despite their grievances, I would assure the committee that we, immune to such absurdly human and mixed reactions, hated it absolutely; and, greatest contradiction of all, when they denounced the American scene as corrupt and degenerate, I was to say that we,…†   (source)
  • "Faisal dragged the guy around a corner, into an alley, so Tara wouldn't have to be degraded by watching, and beat him unconscious," Mortenson says.†   (source)
  • Alone at his desk at Poplar Forest, where more than a hundred slaves labored in the fields beyond his window, Jefferson had written one of themost impassioned denunciations of his life, decrying slavery as an extreme depravity: The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions [Jefferson had written], the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.†   (source)
  • She made it clear that she took it for granted that men had degrading instincts which constituted the secret, ugly part of marriage.†   (source)
  • I accepted their code and believed, as they taught me, that the values of one's spirit must remain as an impotent longing, unexpressed in action, untranslated into reality, while the life of one's body must be lived in misery, as a senseless, degrading performance, and those who attempt to enjoy it must be branded as inferior animals.†   (source)
  • Let us part now, you who threw Your woman's gauntlet to an abyss of degradations: I am the arena of your ordeal.†   (source)
  • Which in itself would not be odd at all, she reflects, were it not for the fact that it is the very first time she has experienced an emotion having to do with Nathan that resembles anything so degrading as pity.†   (source)
  • And Emerson proclaimed that "Every drop of blood in that man's veins has eyes that look downward…… Webster's absence of moral faculty is degrading to the country."†   (source)
  • …on the subject years later in articles contributed to Scribner's and Forum magazines: In a large sense, the independence of the executive office as a coordinate branch of the government was on trial…… If …. the President must step down…. a disgraced man and a political outcast …. upon insufficient proofs and from partisan considerations, the office of President would be degraded, cease to be a coordinate branch of the government, and ever after subordinated to the legislative will.†   (source)
  • It was also a rare privilege, the kerchief; only those prisoners fortunate enough to work at Haus Miss were ever permitted thus to secrete the degrading baldness which to one degree or another every inmate, male and female, presented to this hermetically sealed world behind the electrified fences.†   (source)
  • Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation.†   (source)
  • Every degradation of the spirit that can be conceived.†   (source)
  • The physical degradation of men, women, and children.†   (source)
  • To feel the same degradation and shame you cast on others?†   (source)
  • You cannot degrade yourself and expect for me to provide you with things.†   (source)
  • Absent a severe degradation in the security situation.†   (source)
  • He was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation.†   (source)
  • Where he has been degraded elsewhere by unjust men of both races, here he is resisting degradation.†   (source)
  • (Points accusingly) That chain of office that you wear is a degradation!†   (source)
  • Knocking out a few systems created problems too big to fix, overloading emergency services, producing gridlock and paralysis with no graceful degradation to previous technologies or systems.†   (source)
  • Jane thought about all the reasons on each side: the degradation of being a servant versus the value of earning her own money.†   (source)
  • "What I mean by graceful degradation," continued Chuck as Sarah filled his plate, "is that there's no way to revert to previous technology if something fails anymore."†   (source)
  • "Yes, because what's a life of degradation and torture compared with a charming bistro on the Champs-Élysées?"†   (source)
  • The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.†   (source)
  • "I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I've ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more.†   (source)
  • There was a world of reproach in his face, and Johnnie answered it with eyes of such shame and contrition as convinced him that she knew well the degradation of what she was doing.†   (source)
  • The vibration is mainly a surface ship problem, and the screw degradation was eventually conquered by improved metallurgical technology.†   (source)
  • Then he was renewing the dream in our hearts: "…. this barren land after Emancipation," he intoned, "this land of darkness and sorrow, of ignorance and degradation, where the hand of brother had been turned against brother, father against son, and son against father; where master had turned against slave and slave against master; where all was strife and darkness, an aching land.†   (source)
  • He was dressed in an immaculate starched white shalwar that announced he didn't degrade himself with the dusty business of this world.†   (source)
  • And in the meantime, they are going to be counter-firing its soft-skin mirror systems, so power is going to degrade fast.†   (source)
  • But even if they get hotter the stuff doesn't degrade, and besides meat and such like, I've got them filled with tasty vegetables and fruits."†   (source)
  • If you barbarians had to degrade the name of a great city of yours, you could at least refrain from doing it to me.†   (source)
  • Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray-that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade.†   (source)
  • Since the Glatun could, somehow, inhibit any degradation in organic materials, "rations" meant a very choice selection of foods.†   (source)
  • He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation.†   (source)
  • She knew also that this was his rebellion against the world around them, against its worship of degradation, against the long torment of his wasted days and lightless struggle-this was what he wished to assert and, alone with her in the half-darkness high in space above a city of ruins, to hold as the last of his property.†   (source)
  • With an awed contempt-awed by the enormity of the sight-she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.†   (source)
  • It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of the first train's engine on the John Galt Line-and the sight of Philip's eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human degradation: an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a skeleton toward a living being, demanding that this pain be held as the highest of values.†   (source)
  • And I have no doubt that most Cubans today look forward to the time when they will be truly free--free from foreign domination, free to choose their own leaders, free to select their own system, free to own their own land, free to speak and write and worship without fear or degradation.†   (source)
  • Dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker as a human being, the degradation of women.†   (source)
  • I could not shake the almost desperate sadness all this evoked, and I marveled that sounds could so degrade the spirit.†   (source)
  • Once before in his life, in Suwon, immediately after its recapture and before the Military Government people had begun to clean up, Randy had seen degradation such as this.†   (source)
  • My attempts at jacket copy filled me with a sense of degradation, especially since the books I had been assigned to magnify represented not literature but its antipodean opposite, commerce.†   (source)
  • I said, determined to see if he would not offer me the use of the dilapidated outhouse, which certainly no human could degrade any more than time and the elements had.†   (source)
  • They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from "winning," even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race.†   (source)
  • The loathsomeness of what had happened to her was something that even twenty months at the camp—with its daily, inhuman degradation and nakedness—could not make her feel less befouled.†   (source)
  • Can you picture so foul, so degraded a she who would tell this to a child so young!†   (source)
  • She practiced a degrading system of taboos for her child's protection.†   (source)
  • It was degrading to play with girls and in our talk we relegated them to a remote island of life.†   (source)
  • She stressed the contrast, because it degraded her.†   (source)
  • You would not expect him actually to perform those degrading acts?†   (source)
  • There was something degrading in the fact that Maxim had hit Favell.†   (source)
  • He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love.†   (source)
  • My questions had been degrading, shameful.†   (source)
  • He has had but two outlets for his emotions: work and sex"and he knew these in their most vicious and degrading forms.†   (source)
  • We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.†   (source)
  • How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?†   (source)
  • The world of the dance and pleasure resorts, the cinemas, bars and hotel lounges that for me, the hermit and esthete, had always about it something trivial, forbidden, and degrading, was for Maria and Hermine and their companions the world pure and simple.†   (source)
  • Instead of being ashamed at having his degrading occupation thrown in his face, he seemed pleased and laughed uproariously, slapping Hugh on the back.†   (source)
  • The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and servants--"sons" is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals.†   (source)
  • But in the presence of whites he would play the role of a clown of the most debased and degraded type.†   (source)
  • He felt bitterly that Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he screamed denunciation and abuse at her on his return home.†   (source)
  • But within our boundaries we, too, drew a line that included our right to bread regardless of the indignities or degradations involved in getting it.†   (source)
  • So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants.†   (source)
  • And no matter which side they took, the relatives heartily deplored the fact that India had taken it upon herself to wash the family dirty linen so publicly and involve Ashley in so degrading a scandal.†   (source)
  • They were dominated by the weary and degrading egotism of life, which is blandly philosophical over the death of the alien, but sees in its own the corruption of natural law.†   (source)
  • I would have consented to live under the most rigid type of dictatorship, for I felt that dictatorships, too, defined the use of men, however degrading that use might be.†   (source)
  • The other one is that they know you're degrading yourself by needing them, you're coming down off a pinnacle—every loneliness is a pinnacle—and they're delighted to drag you down through their friendship.†   (source)
  • It seemed to me, as I sat there in bed, staring at the wall, at the sunlight coming in at the window, at Maxim's empty bed, that there was nothing quite so shaming, so degrading as a marriage that had failed.†   (source)
  • I had just experienced something that was degrading and horrible and mad, something that I did not fully understand even now, that I had no wish to remember, that I wanted to bury for ever more deep in the shadows of my mind with old forgotten terrors of childhood; but even this did not matter as long as Maxim was all right.†   (source)
  • But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that must be rather degraded creatures.†   (source)
  • Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him.†   (source)
  • You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.†   (source)
  • You will only kiss—embrace—a thing you've degraded.†   (source)
  • Other boys did not do such things, and besides, somehow it seemed shabby and even degrading.†   (source)
  • "it's too degrading. if I go now I go for good.†   (source)
  • You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded.†   (source)
  • "What?" he answered, catching her degraded deafness.†   (source)
  • "There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.†   (source)
  • He turned to his family, and degraded himself to a professional beggar.†   (source)
  • He was free from degrading fears and free from prejudice.†   (source)
  • He wanted passionately to get rid of the love that obsessed him; it was degrading and hateful.†   (source)
  • I had now a new conception of my degraded condition.†   (source)
  • It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter."†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)