What is reduce?

Famous quotes containing the word reduce:

“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)

“As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Modern photographers can reduce bones to formlessness, and change a face of the most strange, exquisite and unfathomable beauty into the face of a clubwoman.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)