It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.
"The Art of Public Speaking"
Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
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.
"The Age of Shakespeare"
Algernon Charles Swinburne
And cold, cold day and night, cold that brutalizes, that degenerates you till you would sell your soul, your mother's soul to be warm again.
"Home Fires in France"
Dorothy Canfield