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Use undermine in a sentence

Definition of undermine:

  • (verb) destroy property or hinder normal operations or work against;
  • (verb) hollow out as if making a cave or opening;

Sentence Examples:

In such ways religion in art was gradually undermined, not alone by naturalism and classicism but by art itself.

And now and then a human foible might be recorded by the stonemason without risk of undermining society's foundations.

Rustication saved him perhaps in the sense that it detached him; it undermined his ambitions, which had been foolish.

One of those rats who are beginning, in the field of politics, to undermine our glorious and recently united German Empire!

For lack of food nourishes the pestilence that eats away men's strength, and lack of victual undermines store of weapons.

A tendency to undermine the best interests of the art is, however, insidiously at work to misguide the public taste.

The undermined archway of rock is less able to withstand the agents of denudation, and the cliff front recedes apace.

Proselyting societies make frequent confession of the difficulty they find in undermining the faith even of ignorant and needy Catholics.

The racially suicidal result of all this is the undermining of the control of the Nordic races over the natives.

Vast wealth has temptations which fatally and surely undermine the moral structure of persons not habituated to its possession.

With the seamy side of life constantly before him, he may find that his faith in human nature is being undermined.

His Excellency is of opinion that you work too sedulously, and that you will undermine your health by such assiduous study.

Hugo's book is an attack upon both these venerable beliefs, and also upon the positivists who are trying to undermine them.'

Who first had undermined that accepted view of destiny, had disordered that well-schooled, almost Sunday-schooled, scheme of her life?

"The supremacy of love," meaning the supremacy of animalism, is the excuse for undermining the very foundations of family life.

Such vacillating interpretations of constitutional law unsettle our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of the whole people.

He had long seen that it was more this than the plotting of the Revolutionists which was undermining his power.

Instead of propping I have rather undermined the tottering fabric, and thus aided the natural decay from time and seasons.

At least two small lakes which formed behind dams of glacial moraine have disappeared recently when the dams were undermined.

It undermined the power of prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance upon argument, discussion, and persuasion.

Considerable tracts of country are so completely undermined by these animals, that horses in passing over, sink above their fetlocks.

For a moment, I forgot my own necessitous condition, and reflected not that abstinence had already undermined my strength.

It, also, is a 12th century building, built on a high slope, with its chapel undermined with a series of catacombs.

Hence, her stratagems to undermine the reputation of my protector, and to bereave him of domestic comfort, were subtle and profound.

Lenin had been instructed to seek to undermine by all means the confidence of the Russian people in the Provisional Government.

A pampered person already undermined by the habit of easy living will turn dizzy at the mere perspective of a rejuvenation.

He undermines insidiously decorum, the central doctrine of the classicist, at the very time that he seems to be defending it.

Her father's effort to undermine her good name extended to the publication of a lithographed account of his side of the story.

It was the discovery that the moon has no perceptible atmosphere that first seriously undermined the theory of its habitability.

The special privileges granted to them by the emperor were, however, gradually undermined and revoked by the Hungarian Estates.

The leading adversaries of the deists appealed, like them, to reason, and, in appealing to reason, did much to undermine authority.

Contrasted with this awesome undermined wall, the broken, steeple-sloped precipices adjoining it on the upstream side looked hopefully scalable to Ashton.

The peasantry had ceased to be dangerous since the establishment of serfdom; the power of the cities was now thoroughly undermined.

All these circumstances, and many more of the same kind, were slowly and surely undermining the vigor of the Italian intellect.

We are far from believing that these gentlemen know how they have been undermining the foundations of civilized and social life.

The plan was to favor the growth of new rationalistic cults, and to undermine revealed religion by a secular system of education.

Her international misdeeds are past all number; she saps and undermines all that has been laboriously built up by others.

The morphia had not only undermined her physical health, but had made her mind the prey of every passing emotion.

The men who have built our great congested cities have undermined the pillars of the temple of our national strength and safety.

She had dissipated his resources by undermining his confidence, and left him perilously near to the stultification of personal bitterness.

The internal change, which undermined the foundations of the empire, we have endeavored to explain with some degree of order and perspicuity.

It was expected, for instance, that the secret Australian ballot would do much to undermine the power of the professional politician.

Such vacillating interpretations of constitutional law must unsettle our faith in judicial authority, and undermine the liberties of the whole people.

These men retain their strength and in no way seem to be undermining their health by the accomplishment of their Herculean labors.

Anti-monarchist Jewry, sustained by money, cannot help undermining in every way the Monarchical German Empire, sustained by its material power.

Meantime, and while James was still industriously undermining his throne, his relations with his destined successor were becoming more strained.

The country's immediate economic challenge is an acute financial crisis that is undermining monetary stability and preventing disbursement of foreign development assistance.

In one place it had taken away a barn and a cowshed and in another it had undermined the foundations of several houses.

From that date his heart-disease undermined him rapidly; and the few friends whom he received augured ill from what they remarked.

In a thousand ways, many of them approaching actual mendacity, she undermined Harriet's usefulness, and annoyed and distracted the domestic force.

The following year the Tory manipulators began to undermine the foundations of their opponents, and they seduced from allegiance the Hon.

Murder, theft, backbiting, undermining, circumventing, are vicious because they are not positive acts, but prevent them in the perpetrator and the victim.

She continued to undermine what she called "the special pleader," on the ground that "I prefer an advocate in flesh and blood."

Knowing all this perfectly well, we talked with entire freedom of our nefarious scheme for undermining the safety of the German Empire.

Little Marigold's winsomeness and unselfishness completely undermined an unreasoning hostility and prejudice which her aunts had conceived towards her mother.

The banks were of red earth, which had been much undermined by the river, leaving a perpendicular scarp of about fifty feet.

Nor did the alliance last long; it was sundered even before luxury and despotism had undermined and overthrown the empire of Solomon.

Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for political or artistic life.

To make it wholly ideal, would be at the same time to idealize all phenomena, and to undermine the very conception of an external world.

Although she casts no doubt upon the necessity and indispensability of marriage in our days, she undermines the belief in its eternal continuance.

Were they to sit there supinely looking on while those vile foreign agitators were undermining the very foundations of Religion and Social Order?

Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to "show results" that was undermining and vulgarizing education.

The impunity with which these sacrileges had been perpetrated had made a profound impression, and did no little to undermine Hellenic faith.

It was an instinct which, if gratified, would have undermined the whole fabric of the Dinner, being essentially egoistic, destructive and malign.

Had she divulged the nameless horror, and the cowardice which unnerved his arm, unsettled his reason, and undermined his strength?

And, while this gradual disintegration of the absoluteness of authority was in process, other circumstances operated to undermine the old traditional order.

This appears to be the usual result, of excessively seasonable weather acting on a constitution previously undermined by bigamy, murder, and similar excesses.

The court party was increasingly exasperated against the popular duke, and many stories were fabricated against him to undermine his influence.

The most important of the many causes which were at work to undermine the manorial system in the fourteenth century is, therefore, plain.

Boulders, logs, and other obstructions are undermined and, as a result of gopher activity, in time sink under the surface of the ground.

Wealth and power had inflated them with false security, with egotistic aims; or else had enervated them and undermined their strength.

He does not even consider deism a necessary assumption for a moral code; he admits that the opinion of atheists does not undermine ethics.

That returned to him, however, but a complication of complaints, including asthma, sciatica, and dropsy, began gradually to undermine his powerful frame.

For more than two centuries Russian orthodoxy has been undermined by obscure sects, unknown to foreigners, and little known to Russians themselves.

They undermine the authority of the Iraqi government and security forces, as well as the ability of Sunnis to join a peaceful political process.

Stately, externally powerful, although undermined and putrescent at the core, the death-stricken empire still dashed back the assaults of its barbarous enemies.

All the streams were out of banks; the valley became a network of small sloughs undermining the snowfields, creating innumerable ponds and lakes.

This vast system of organized oppression, like all tyranny, "was not so much an institution as a destitution," undermining and impoverishing the country.

The powerful class of rich peasantry, if it was not finally annihilated, proved to be shaken to its foundations, with its self-reliance undermined.

In its seething fury it formed whirlpools, tore itself and whatever came in its way, and in the end undermined the very rocks.

The purity of the language was completely undermined by the rhyming self-called Rhetoricians, and their abandoned courses brought poetry itself into disrepute.

In that case, as all my experiments emphatically declare, the fall of the stake undermined by the sextons is a pure matter of imagination.

Both the prairie vole and the pine vole often feed upon the inner bark and root crowns of small saplings, sometimes completely undermining them.

In this case all my experiments emphatically assert that the fall of the stake undermined by the sextons is a pure matter of imagination.

Before he could reach her the gabled front of a house undermined by the fire lurched forward, tottered, and came down with a roar.

The marmots burrow in the ground like rabbits, and sometimes the country is undermined with their burrows for a space of several miles.

It seems probable, however, that Pan-German fanaticism was rendered infectious only by the fear that Germany was to be economically encircled and undermined.

A sinus about five inches long had worked its channel from the wound down to the instep, which was undermined by an abscess.

Theirs not to wanton in sloth and banquets spread; unbridled pleasure tempts them not, nor can the lure of youth undermine their characters.

She had just been demobilized, and, as she freely admitted, four years of conundrums and traps had undermined the frankness of her disposition.

Then, too, the thaws of spring loosened the road-bed and softened it; freshets undermined it and sapped the foundations of bridge and culvert.

"We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts."

A large proportion of the wives of men in whom the infection has not been wholly eradicated pay the penalty in permanently undermined health.

The proselytizing movement had also created a suspicion that it was hypocritical, and that it was masking a deliberate attempt to undermine the Establishment.

Frost and freshet are constant foes; the one heaves and cracks, and the other tears down through the cracks to undermine and destroy.

It is a rare spreading dermatitis starting from an injury, extending by a serous undermining of the epidermis, and usually occurring upon the upper extremities.

If so, they must have led a migratory existence; and perhaps its slipperiness had infected and undermined the stability of the judge's affections.

It preyed upon his mind; it saddened, worried and sickened him until it utterly undermined his health and broke down his nervous system.

Don't you see that if you disturb or even threaten the institution of private property you undermine the home, imperil the state and destroy initiative?

It seemed to "set her up"; but it so undermined her strength, through its artificial nerve spur, that chronic catarrh was followed by consumption.