spoliate. verb. To plunder, rob or deprive. Legally, altering a document and making it invalid. In wartime, the authorized seizure of neutral vessels. A less common form of despoil. From Latin spolium (spoil).
“…give me back my spoliated rights – restore me to my violated franchises – give me back my liberty, or – I pause upon the brink of the alternative to which I had hurried, and, receding from it, leave it to you to complete the sentence.” (Richard Lalor Sheil)
“…the wood seemed to Alan to have a tender bruised beauty, spring renewing it only for further spoliation, and he knew the authors were right when they wrote of what love does, of how it transforms and glorifies and takes the scales from the eye of the beholder.” (Ruth Rendell)
“In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good.” (Charles Dickens)
“I didn’t collude in the depreciation of its currency, the spoliation of its countryside, the desecration of its towns, the destruction of its grammar schools or even the mutilation of the liturgy of its Church. For what am I personally expected to feel a responsibility?” (P. D. James)
“…the Brits would never have prevail’d in India.. .in their Spoliation of Scotland they had learn’d the Power of that Cry that never Breathes, the direct Appeal to Animal Terror, and converted it to their Uses, leaving Loin-cloths besmear’d all up and down the Tropickal World.” (Thomas Pynchon)
“…in her own case, the spoliations of time have not resulted in the swelling, puddling, thickening or bloated effects of the aging process in both her stepsisters and (to a somewhat lesser extent) myself.” David Foster Wallace
Is’t not enough that thrifty millionaires
Who loot in freight and spoliate in fares,
Or, cursed with consciences that bid them fly
To safer villainies of darker dye,
Forswearing robbery and fain, instead,
To steal (they call it “cornering”) our bread
May see you groveling their boots to lick
And begging for the favor of a kick?
(Ambrose Bierce)