(verb) To ward off attacks against; to fight to protect; to guard.
"May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies."
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
"This is Nature's own reservation, and every lover of wildness will rejoice with me that by kindly frost it is so well defended."
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
"He who defends with love will be secure; Heaven will save him, and protect him with love."
"We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard."