"Perversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speeches of Thomas, of Massachusetts, and Crittenden, of Kentucky, fill more than twenty-two pages—reserving a line or two of text at the top. To say nothing of the sentiments, such notes are a shameful abuse of the reputation and work of Mr. Wheaton, and a perversion of the duties and rights of an editor. But a word of the sentiments. He exhausts himself and the records of the past in accumulating precedents to condemn the policy of freeing slaves as a war measure, or of arming them in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the most singular perversion I have ever witnessed. Mrs. Logan, I entertain strong suspicions that the prisoner, or her agents, have made some agreement with you on this matter to prevent ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... For, although I approved not of their separation from the general presbyterian kirk of Scotland, nor was altogether content with their declaration published at Sanquhar, there was yet one clause which, to my spirit, impoverished of all hope, was as food and raiment; and that there may be no perversion concerning the same in after times, I shall here set down the words of the clause, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... silly to be believed. But they came—to their certain fate. In the month after I returned from France and Italy, no less than four of these fatuities were exploded and destroyed within thirty miles of my Essex home.... There in chosen phrases you have the truth about these things. But now mark the perversion of thought due ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... progress. In every department of life, men stimulate one another toward a higher standard of endeavor, attainment, or excellence. What each does, his neighbor would fain outdo; what each becomes, his neighbor would fain surpass. It is only by perversion that this desire tends to evil. It finds its proper satisfaction, not in crushing, depressing, or injuring a rival, but barely in overtaking and excelling him; and the higher his point of attainment, the greater is the complacency ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... placed fairly before the world their respective statements. Had Mr O'Connell alluded to the charges, he must have also adverted to the explanations, and this would not have suited him; for with all his talent for perversion, and, until the appearance of Lord Devon's report, we thought that in this respect he was unequalled, he never could have made so good a thing out of the same materials as he found left cut and dry to his hand, in the passage of the report which he so often appeals ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... so horribly that the form and face of the man hardly left any memory of themselves except the memory of the squint. His dark hair, his one perfect eye, his good figure, his expressive mouth, were all lost in that dreadful perversion of vision. It was a misfortune so great as to justify him in demanding that he should be judged by different laws than those which are used as to the conduct of the world at large. In getting a wife he might surely use ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... and then the defeat of that death that seems to threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun. God fights against death in every form, against the great death of the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness, misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who can deliver us "from the body of this death." This is the battle that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... either in favor or opposed; whilst some must oppose whatever they themselves do not originate;—and, others again, have no doubt been led honestly to entertain a distrust which has finally grown into an opposition, through the influence of misrepresentations, or from a perversion of facts by those whose interests, from some cause, are ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... own art the style of thought and work familiar to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form has gone, the old beauty dropped ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... SMITH (of Coalville), and others—are actually to be found contending for the barren honour of having invented that terrible nuisance of a catch-phrase, "Three Acres and a Cow!" Strange and morbid perversion of ambition! As well fight for the deep discredit of having been the first to hit upon such kindred controversial horrors as the boring and question-begging "gags" of "Law and Order," "Patriot first, and Party-man afterwards," "Hand over to the tender mercies, &c.," "Disintegration ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... Majesty's authority according to the Constitution of his Royal Charter;" and with attempting to overthrow the rights of the colony under the charter by bringing in a military force to overawe and suppress the civil authorities. They denounced them as guilty of a perversion of their trust, and as having committed a breach upon the dignity of the crown, by pursuing a course "derogatory to His Majesty's authority here established," and "repugnant to His Majesty's princely and gracious intention in betrusting them with such a commission." ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... is another instance of perversion. Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust the blase aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the Bush' employed to attract the attention ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... which was made to screen mankind from the excesses of power: such a claim, I will venture to say, is a monster that never existed, except in the wild imagination of some theorist. It cannot be admitted, because it is a perversion of the fundamental principle, that every power given for the protection of the people below should be responsible to the power above. It is to suppose that the people shall have no laws with regard to him, yet, when ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... animals, when captured by man, that St Hilaire makes two great classes of animals useful to man:—the tame, which will not breed, and the domestic which will breed in domestication. From certain singular facts we might have supposed that the non-breeding of animals was owing to some perversion of instinct. But we meet with exactly the same class of facts in plants: I do not refer to the large number of cases where the climate does not permit the seed or fruit to ripen, but where the flowers do not "set," owing to some imperfection of the ovule or pollen. The latter, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... instances of law violated in civilized communities, and holds them up as the criterion by which to judge civilization, and triumphantly exclaims, Lo! the fruits of civilization—of that civilization which arrogates to itself the right to enslave mankind! But this is merely a bare perversion of truth. He deceives no one so much as himself, when he imagines the world will take the exception for the RULE of civilization, or make it the pretext ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... to love. The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been—a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as she—but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... give strength to the type of government and social conditions which the ruling class desired to have perpetuated. This has been the evident purpose in Japan (R. 334), though the government of Imperial Germany formed perhaps the best illustration of such perversion. This was seen and pointed out long ago by Horace Mann (R. 281). There the idea of nationality through education (R. 342) was carried to such an extreme as made the government oppressive to subject peoples and a menace to neighboring States. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... ascertain the condition of the men. He found them faint, and so exhausted, that they could not possibly survive much longer, yet still watching over their darling treasure. It was melancholy to witness such perversion of intellect, and Krantz thought of a plan which might save their lives. He proposed to them each separately, that they should bury their money so deep, that it was not to be recovered without time: this would prevent any one from attacking ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... too, in the person of the young Scripture reader, whose conscience pricks him for the part he played. Surely I am punished, if ever woman were, for a too ingenious perversion of ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... hesitation, no shamefaced looks, no recoiling from the arms that were stretched out to her, or from the lips that begged; none of those delightful little pieces of awkwardness which show a virgin soul free from all perversion, in her manner of sitting on my knees, or putting her bare arms round my neck, and of offering me the back of her neck and her lips to kiss, but she laughed nervously, and her supple form trembled when I kissed her passionately on various places, and she said things ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... this quotation of his friend conveyed an assent to his opinion, "Very true," said he, "Potato domine date, this piece is not worth a single potato." Peregrine was astonished at this surprising perversion of the words and meaning of a Latin line, which, at first, he could not help thinking was a premeditated joke; but, upon second thoughts, he saw no reason to doubt that it was the extemporaneous effect of sheer pertness and ignorance, at which he broke out into an immoderate fit of laughter. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... have been the complacent victims of a system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their private lives were model citizens. But they have suffered from a curious moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to do for themselves. Fortunately for us all that delusion is passing ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... danger is not seen by all, there is one thing that cannot be denied or disputed, and that is that the treaties are the negation of the principles for which the United States and Italy, without any obligation on them, entered the War; they are a perversion of all the Entente had repeatedly proclaimed; they break into pieces President Wilson's fourteen points which were a solemn pledge for the American people, and to-morrow they will be the greatest moral weapon with which the conquered of to-day will ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... upon the good name and dignity of his own family. That ideal of simplicity and directness which he regarded as the very essence of domestic morality had been blurred and marred within his own home by the taint of that poison which he believed to threaten the perversion of English life. From its encroachments he would fain have kept his own household free; but it was in that household that he saw that poison first assert itself, and even encroach upon the royal dignity ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... poems of Thomas Ashe, and it is worthy of note, as perhaps supporting the contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling, that Ashe had been a clergyman. An attentiveness to the woman's pleasure remains, in itself, very far from a perversion, but increases, as Colin Scott has pointed out, with civilization, while its absence—the indifference to the partner's pleasure—is a perversion of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in accordance with the smile that stretched her thin lips to a line of mocking mirth. One glimpse of sympathy would have carried me to her arms for refuge—distasteful as she was to me in every way save one. She, like myself, was a woman. But such perversion of all natural feeling estranged me from her ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Being moral as well as intellectual supremacy, which acknowledges an outward world distinct from Him, and which represents Him as causing the changes in that universe by the acts of an intelligent volition, can only by a strange perversion of language be ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... its policy of frightfulness, it held in reserve murderous inventions that had been contributed to the German General Staff by chemists and other scientists working in conjunction with the war. Never since the dawn of time had there been such a perversion of knowledge to criminal purposes; never had science contributed such a deadly toll to the fanatic and criminal intentions of a ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... approach my plays in a condition which is really one of derangement, and are quite unable to conceive a play of mine as anything but a trap baited with paradoxes, and designed to compass their ethical perversion and intellectual confusion. If it were possible, I should put forward all my plays anonymously, or hire some less disturbing person, as Bacon is said to have hired Shakespear, to father my ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... deception: for how often does the Body appropriate what was meant for the Cloth only! Whoso would avoid falsehood, which is the essence of all Sin, will perhaps see good to take a different course. That reverence which cannot act without obstruction and perversion when the Clothes are full, may have free course when they are empty. Even as, for Hindoo Worshippers, the Pagoda is not less sacred than the God; so do I too worship the hollow cloth Garment with equal fervour, as when it contained the Man: nay, with more, for I now fear no ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Paraguay. The mother's milk often fails. We may also attribute to the disturbance of the sexual functions the frequent occurrence of that monstrous instinct which leads the mother to devour her own offspring,—a mysterious case of perversion, as it ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... madmen are excluded from admission into the Order, for the evident reason that the former from an absence, and the latter from a perversion of the intellectual faculties, are incapable of comprehending the objects, or of assuming the responsibilities and ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... appropriate work of determining how much of it comes within "the sphere of practical politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as an independent power apart from, and outside of, the State, would make such a perversion extremely probable. A hierarchy of priests, under a despotic Pope, would soon cease to be, in any sense, a spiritual power; and this would be only the more certain if, by the Comtist denunciation of specialism, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Miss Monflathers, 'that it's very naughty and unfeminine, and a perversion of the properties wisely and benignantly transmitted to us, with expansive powers to be roused from their dormant state through the medium ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... mankind. Remember, too, that to shew mercy is better than to shed blood; the sword killeth, but the favor of the ruler bringeth joy and happiness. Conclude the war as speedily as possible, for war is a perversion of nature; in peace the sons outlive the fathers, but in war the fathers live to mourn for their slain sons. Farewell, my young ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been told, and by those whose business it is to know such things, that the models created by great Paris dressmakers are not always flashes of genius which come in the night, nor the wilful perversion of an existing fashion, to force the world of women into discarding, and buying everything new. It may look suspiciously like it when we see a mere swing of the pendulum carrying the straight sheath out to the ten-yard limit of ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... the House; he was carried to Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end. His last battle was at least heroic. If his stroke was struck on the wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life. He could not bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously right and just at the command of a league between ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... I think that Dr. Newman meant? I found a preacher bidding Christians imitate, to some undefined point, the 'arts' of the basest of animals, and of men, and of the devil himself. I found him, by a strange perversion of Scripture, insinuating that St. Paul's conduct and manner were such as naturally to bring down on him the reputation of being a crafty deceiver. I found him—horrible to say it—even hinting the same of one greater than St. Paul. I found him denying or explaining away ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the rich boast of their wealth, i.e., robbery; the commanders in the army pride themselves on victories, i.e., murder; and those in high places vaunt their power, i.e., violence? We do not see the perversion in the views of life held by these people, only because the circle formed by them is more extensive, and we ourselves are ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... sins will find you out. Through wilful perversion of the pleasing name the Professor had rendered himself ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... Hoadly in one sense may be regarded as a 'Freethinker' himself; but it was the very fact that he was so which made him resent Collins's perversion of the term. The first of his 'Queries to the Author of a Discourse of Freethinking' is 'Whether that can be justly called Freethinking which is manifestly thinking with the utmost slavery; and with the strongest ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... infatuating cant is more deeply associated with depravity and continuance in vice than is generally supposed. I recollect hardly one instance of a return to honest pursuits, and habits of industry, where this miserable perversion of our noblest and peculiar faculty was not ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... in London, whither his father took him and a volume of sermons, in the first year of the reign of King James; and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years of his scholastic and collegiate life. Thus there was less danger to Tom of a perversion of his faith by the Director, who scarce ever saw him, than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the Vicar's company; but as long as Harry's religion was his Majesty's, and my lord's, and my lady's, the Doctor said ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... my jealous mind connect these men with every perversion and corruption of Gospel truth. They are at this moment as well the plotting mind as the executing arm of the rotten Church of Rome. The spirit of Loyola would seem lately to have left Hades, to animate his followers upon earth. Be sure, Sir Christopher, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... therefore, ask your Honor, after the elaborate argument on the part of the plaintiff, to discharge this woman: for after such an abundance of testimony unbroken and incontestable as that we have exhibited here, it would be a monstrous perversion of reason to suppose that anything ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... own immediate affairs, and meets those interests which we have in common with the rest of humankind. Much as we deplore the wanton destruction of property, much as we bewail the reckless loss of life, we mourn especially the diminution of ethical standards and the perversion of our whole outlook on life. For this means the lapse of much for which our own teachers have stood, the forfeit of many a principle which has been dear to the Jewish heart. Let me touch lightly upon three points out of the many ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... walk, catching the toe of one foot in the heel of the other and blundering forward, head down, her short, straight hair flapping over her face. She landed flat-footed on the porch. She began to speak, using a ridiculous perversion of words, scarcely articulate, then in vogue in ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... more than a reciprocal amount of the work, it stands to reason that they can not do good work; and, if they can not do good work, the whole colony must suffer in a general way, while the bowels must also suffer in a special way. The function of drainage or sewerage is very important, and the perversion of it brings on much ill health. The principal perversion to the function of sewerage is that of constipation, the location of which is limited to the lower portion of the large intestine, a section of the canal least endowed with digestive and ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... is infinitely more difficult to judge in advance of youths just going out into the world by what they do. Their words, which reveal what they are thinking and how they are thinking, give almost the only vision of their minds; and "by their words ye shall know them" becomes not a perversion, but an adaptation of the old text. Would you judge of a boy just graduated entirely by the acts he had performed in college? If you did, you would make some profound and ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the popular to the philosophical. The first two are simple enough and partially true, like the first thoughts of an intelligent youth; the third, which is a real contribution to ethical philosophy, is perverted by the ingenuity of Socrates, and hardly rescued by an equal perversion on the part of Critias. The remaining definitions have a higher aim, which is to introduce the element of knowledge, and at last to unite good and truth in a single science. But the time has not yet arrived for the realization of this vision of metaphysical philosophy; and such a science when ...
— Charmides • Plato
... perversion. In the present instance it is turned to bad account. The young lady is admirably adapted to the stage, and if she would adopt that profession the very faculty of approbativeness would be her most powerful stimulus in ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... harmonized with the laws of the universe. So, when the white race assumes as a hypothesis that it is the main object of creation and that all things else are merely subsidiary to its well-being, sophism, subterfuge, perversion of conscience, arrogance, injustice, oppression, cruelty, sacrifice of human blood, all are required to maintain the position, and its dealings with other races become indeed a problem, a problem which, if based on a hypothesis of common humanity, could be solved ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... Monday. If you want the third day, or within three days, why not take as many as you need for your argument, from the eighteen other texts, and not take this isolated one, and then pervert it, as you have done. The only object that I can see, in your perversion of the text, is to prove, as you say, that Jesus was three nights in the heart of the earth, viz.: Friday night, one; Saturday night, two, and Sabbath night, three. You say, "that Christ was actually raised the third day and not the ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... of proceeding as any part of my plan. In a plan of reformation, it would be one of my maxims, that, when I know of an establishment which may be subservient to useful purposes, and which at the same time, from its discretionary nature, is liable to a very great perversion from those purposes, I would limit the quantity of the power that might be so abused. For I am sure that in all such cases the rewards of merit will have very narrow bounds, and that partial or corrupt favor will be infinite. This principle is not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as a sexual organ is considered as a perversion if the lips (tongue) of the one are brought into contact with the genitals of the other, but not when the mucous membrane of the lips of both touch each other. In the latter exception we find the connection with the ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... heaven came to his aid. That is to say, the Lord God Jehovah arranged it that one of the leading Methodist clergymen of the city—in fact, the chronicler's chief opponent—should be taken in an unmentionable sexual perversion at the headquarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, and so be forced to leave town between days. This catastrophe, as we say, the chronicler ascribes to divine intervention. It was entirely unexpected; ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... was the first to discover the marvellous fund of material for the story-teller buried in the Oriental mine; and he had in a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more captivating than culture or scholarship. Hence his delightful version (or perversion) became one of the world's classics and at once made Sheherazade and Dinarzarde, Haroun Alraschid, the Calendars and a host of other personages as familiar to the home reader as Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver and Dr. Primrose. Without the name and fame won for the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... 16:—"To Abraham, and his seed were the promises made, He saith not ' and to seeds,' (as of roomy) but as of one, ' and to thy seed,' which is Christ." Here is an argument which one would think too far-fetched, even for Paul; and it is built on a perversion of a passage from Genesis, which Paul, bold as he was in these matters, certainly would not have ventured, if he had not the most assured confidence in the blinking credulity of his Galatian converts. His argument in this place is drawn from the use of the ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... ages of the past the Churches were really frowning on violence and warfare, instead of blessing and employing it. They fear to draw out in its full proportion the inefficacy (because of its vagueness) of the gospel and the long perversion of its ministers. Yet we cannot evade this fundamental fact of the situation, that this particular war is an outcome of a general military system, and the Churches have a very grave responsibility for the maintenance of that system until ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... and rails vociferously, can be called properly by that name. Here again it is easy to apply the canon to a newspaper. When a newspaper habitually takes an insulting tone, and deliberately falsifies, whether by assertion of an untruth or by a distortion and perversion of the truth, it is not the work of a gentleman, and if the writer be responsible for the tone of the paper, the manners of that ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... possibilities of its transformation and sublimation, a matter which will be treated later.] Now if the libido symbol raised up for an ideal is placed too nakedly before the seeker, the danger of misunderstanding and perversion is always present. For he is misled by his instincts to take the symbol verbally, that is, in its original, baser sense and to act accordingly. So all religions are degenerate in which one chooses as a libido symbol the unconcealed sexual act, and therefore also ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau's hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... remembered the phrases upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of their inscription. I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, "And when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all." I remembered the "Ave Crux spes Unica"; and St. Just's "The words that we have spoken will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's "Continual ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... wealth—megalomania. The exaltation is universal, and the patient may maintain at one and the same time that he is running a theatrical company, that he is the Prince of Wales, and that he is the Almighty. Moral perversion is a common symptom, and the patient is often guilty of criminal assaults, indecent exposures, bigamous marriages, and the like. It is accompanied with progressive bodily and mental decay. Women are comparatively rarely affected ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the nature of the case and my own PARTI-PRIS, read even with a certain violence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. The study indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page), Thoreau's sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men, I please myself with thinking, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... PROFESSION Hypocrisy Christ's love abused Perversion of the truth A Latitudinarian Changing sins The unholy professor The fruitless professor The unpardonable sin The man in the ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... Literatures, foreign poisonous elements of thought and practice into the mind of his Pupil, which have ruined the young man. For his Majesty perceives that there lies the source of it; that only total perversion of the heart and judgment, first of all, can have brought about these dreadful issues of conduct. And indeed his Majesty understands, on credible information, that Deserter Fritz entertains very heterodox opinions; opinion on Predestination, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics, must alike abhor it. The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit. I am sure many of the members who compose ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and mischievous I grant in its principles and tendencies. But it was promulgated, I am sure, with honest intentions, and he himself was not aware of its extreme liability to misapprehension and perversion. How would his ears tingle at ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... of James P. Beckwourth, edited by T. D. Bonner. Beckwourth was always called "Beckwith" in the mountains, but this was probably only a perversion of the original, though Chittenden seems to think he only assumed the former spelling on publishing ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... obedient pupil, in his green old-fashioned garden at Lower Halliford. To him I first read some of my Undertones, getting many a rap over the knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering with Divine Myths. What mercy could I expect from one who had never forgiven "Johnny" Keats for his frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of Endymion and Selene? and who was horrified at the base "modernism" of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound?" But to think of it! He had known Shelley, and all the rest of the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all! Dear old Pagan, wonderful ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... eminently distinguishes and exalts it above all nations upon the earth." Again, "the constitution has provided very apt and proper remedies for correcting and rectifying the involuntary mistakes of judges, and for punishing and removing them for any perversion of justice. But if their authority is to be trampled on by pamphleteers and news-writers, and the people are to be told that the power given to the judges for their protection is prostituted to their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... about his limitations to know what he can not do. If Mr. Howells should pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should receive the statement courteously; but I should know it for a—well, for a perversion. If the late Josh Billings should rise up and tell me that he wrote Herbert Spencer's philosophies; I should answer and say that the spelling casts a doubt upon his claim. If the late Jonathan Edwards should rise up and tell me ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... journalists I met abroad. I do not like the daily press, and consider it as one of the plagues sent down to torment humanity. The swiftness with which the world becomes acquainted with current events is equal to the superficiality of the information, and does not compensate for the incredible perversion of public opinion, as any one who is not prejudiced must perceive. Thanks to the daily press, the sense which knows how to sift the true from the false has become blunted, the notions of right and wrong have well-nigh disappeared, evil stalks about in the garb of righteousness, and oppression ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... world is addicted to their use. The universality of such use has led many to consider them a necessity to man, and that they are God's gifts to him, and, if rightly used, are of physical benefit. It may not be a perversion of judgment to consider that their widespread popular use is greatly due to the efforts of the race to gain anaesthesia for, and distraction from, those pains and punishments that are the inevitable sequence of departure from hygienic and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... perversion of his guarded statement took Galusha completely by surprise. He started forward aghast. And then he saw Martha Phipps' face. Upon it were written such hope and relief and joy that the words of expostulation ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Scriblerus well says:—"The taste of the bathos is implanted by nature itself in the soul of man; till, perverted by custom or example, he is taught, or rather compelled, to relish the sublime." But with us everything seems directed to prevent any such perversion of us by custom or example as might compel us to relish the sublime; by all means we are encouraged to keep our natural taste for the bathos unimpaired. I have formerly pointed out how in literature the absence of any authoritative centre, like an Academy, tends ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... jealousy of certain English cities succeeded in securing a prohibition of the Irish woollen industry. The southern wool, it is alleged, was checked, and the Belfast linen was favoured—hence the prosperity of the northern capital. This is a really curious perversion of quite modern history. The linen industry was at the time in question in no sense confined to the North and was by no means prominent in Belfast. It was distributed over many districts of Ireland, for whilst Louis Crommelin was sent to Lisburn to look after the French colony settled there, ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... Darby himself. All three had always been reckless, wicked, brutal men; but now, particularly in the case of Ray and Chan, the ordeal brought out and augmented the latent abnormalities that made them criminals in the beginning, developing those odd quirks in human minds that make toward perversion and the ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... grows, As many a nameless slander deftly shows: What she had made the pupil of her art, None know—but that high Soul secured the heart,[rx] And panted for the truth it could not hear, With longing breast and undeluded ear. 20 Foiled was perversion by that youthful mind,[ry] Which Flattery fooled not, Baseness could not blind, Deceit infect not, near Contagion soil, Indulgence weaken, nor Example spoil,[rz] Nor mastered Science tempt her to look down On humbler talents with a pitying frown, Nor Genius swell, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... of separation, the bliss of reunion, and the fortunes of prosperity and of adversity are all, in every detail, true to human nature, and I have not taken upon myself to make the slightest addition, or alteration, which might lead to the perversion ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... tables of the law (which I may say were in Adam's mind and heart, understanding and affection), those two tables were broken in the fall, and since there could be no obedience, because of ignorance and perversion, the tables breaking in pieces, their ruptures have produced these two opposite principles. The fall of man hath broken his mind, and so darkened his understanding, and broken his will, and put it in a wrong set. This appointed it, set it in a posture of enmity against ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... "What manners! What horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution which has tainted a whole generation," mused the returned emigre in a low tone. "Who's your adversary?" he asked a ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... became a young woman telling of a relative's iniquity, Kaiserina glazed the facts and gave a perversion. It was later, therefore, that Felix Clemenceau learned in detail the whole mournful tale of a beautiful wanton's ingrained perfidy and a loving husband's blind confidence. The end was inevitably tragical. ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... the writer's. Now, he said, let us go further on the same path, and, "instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversion of them by mistaken men." Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour St. Paul and Protestantism, therein following Renan's phraseology, in the treatise itself he ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is different in the measure of every man's individuality, and the intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation between man and man, and a man may no more reach God through a priest than love his wife through a priest. But just as a man in love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual man may ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... of theology on the minds of earnest, truth-seeking men—the total prostration of manly dignity, the perversion of the mental faculties, and the debasement of human nature, is truly stated by Mr. Barker in ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... and suffering, but the world in itself is really a perfect work of Divine wisdom and goodness. "The root of evil is not in the nature of the world, but in moral wrong—in a desertion from God." Sin and wickedness arise from the misuse and perversion of things which are not in themselves evil. Christianity calls for a break from the wickedness of the world. It calls upon man to give up his sin, to deny, or break with, the evil of which he is guilty. But it does not expect man to do this in his own strength alone—God ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... maker of Herd's version knew the English, and altered at pleasure, or the Englishman knew a Scots version, and altered at pleasure. The perversion is of ancient standing, undeniably. But when Scott's original text exhibits the same phenomena of perversion, in a part of the ballad missing in Herd's brief lay, Colonel Elliot supposes that NOW ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... but how has it turned out? The property has been used for twenty-four years, to pay a minister who preaches to the whites, and whom the Indians with very few exceptions, will not hear. Is not this a gross perversion of the design of the donors, even if they had any power to have made this grant? No lawyer will pretend that the grant was not void, under this deed alone. There was no grantee, no legal consideration, and no power to convey. The deed remained on record, until 1809, when the ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... who are constantly suffering from depression of spirits, a malady which appears in countless forms. There is not a human being in whose mental constitution there is not something wrong; some weakness, some perversion, some positive vice. And if you want further proof of the truth of what I am saying, given by one whose testimony is worth much more than mine, go and read that eloquent and kindly and painfully fascinating book lately published by Dr. Forbes ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... said the late Lord Lytton, "are too often merely a bonus to public indolence and vice. What a dark lesson of the fallacy of human wisdom does this knowledge strike into the heart! What a waste of the materials of kindly sympathies! What a perversion individual mistakes can cause, even in the virtues of a nation! Charity is a feeling dear to the pride of the human heart—it is an aristocratic emotion! Mahomet testified his deep knowledge of his kind when he allowed the vice ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... of friendship between a Queen and a subject, by those who never felt the existence of such a feeling as friendship, could only be considered in a criminal point of view. But by what perversion could suspicion frown upon the ties between two married women, both living in the greatest harmony with their respective husbands, especially when both became mothers and were so devoted to their ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... The custom of Masons, and other secret orders, of having a form of religion that ignores Christ, that does not recognize His mediatorship and that is not offered in His name, is supremely wicked. It is a gross perversion of the religion of Jesus. And how Christian men, even preachers of the gospel, can find it in their hearts to acquiesce in such a thing, is to us a profound puzzle. The institution that has no place for my Master ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although Caleb Williams attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of the character of an aristocrat through the "poison of chivalry," the story may be enjoyed for its own sake. We can read it, if we so desire, purely for the excitement of the plot, and quietly ignore ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... that, the knowledge of charms is not confined to the creation of beneficial talismans. Its perversion has led to the diabolical practices of the Voodo and Black Magician, whose work is wholly, either for gain or revenge. Nothing, but the most extreme selfishness lies beneath such immoral practices, but, as ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... difficult passage in which Cicero describes the perversion of this character under the influence of Philodemus, has been skilfully translated by Dr. Mahaffy in his Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 126 foll.; and the reader may do well to refer to his whole treatment of the practical ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father, there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it must needs possess a social character; this is founded not only in the nature of man, but still more in the nature of religion. You will acknowledge that it indicates a state of disease, a signal perversion of nature, when an individual wishes to shut up within himself anything which he has produced and elaborated by his own efforts. It is the disposition of man to reveal and to communicate whatever is in ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... let alone—a clever device of throwing dust into our eyes. Another produces what appears to be a pencil drawing, and a very good imitation some of them are, but at best a deception. To make something look like something else is a perversion of a brilliant discovery in photographic processes, which offers the means for securing unity (and in this word lies every principle of composition) by adding to or subtracting from the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... course aside—only so far as they had something to say in her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience, twist of her life, would say most?—so possible was it even that complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his particular purpose ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... no answer to this, as if too much overcome by the true state of the case to be troubled by its perversion. Mr. Arbuton, following them on board, felt himself in the unpleasant character of persecutor, some one to be shunned and escaped by every maneuver possible to self-respect. He was to be the means, it appeared, of spoiling the enjoyment of the voyage ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... a gross perversion of a text of Scripture: "And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, ... let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them." (Gen. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... this proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism and every kind of incantation. I invoke no Acheron to overwhelm him in the whirlpools of its muddy gulf. I do not tell the respectable mover and seconder, by a perversion of their sense and expressions, that their proposition halts between the ridiculous and the dangerous. I am not one of those who start up, three at a time, and fall upon and strike at him with so much eagerness that our daggers ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of money plays an inordinate role in the man's life, and keeps on playing a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... plots be marred and their ranks degraded, for that they knew that the king would have need of that which he had known from that man nor would forget that wherewith he was familiar in him. Now it befell that a certain man of corrupt purpose[FN78] found a way to the perversion of the truth and a means of glozing over falsehood and adorning it with a semblance of fair-seeming and there proceeded from him that wherewith the hearts of the folk were occupied, and their minds were corrupted by his lying ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... guide, and needs correction. Our intellect, like our moral and physical likes and dislikes, is, as I have elsewhere said, perverted by the fall. I will not say that our moral, intellectual and physical tastes are perverted in an equal degree; for I do not think so. Still there is a perversion, greater or less, of the whole man—in all his functions, faculties and affections. As a general rule, when left to our own course, we choose that food, for body, mind and soul, which, though it may ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... or explanation admissible and satisfactory? It is clear that two things are to be considered: the one the guilt of taking bribes or presents on any consideration, the other the moral guilt depending upon the wilful perversion of justice. The attempt has sometimes been made to defend the whole of Bacon's conduct on the ground that he did nothing that was not done by many of his contemporaries. Bacon himself disclaims a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... her. He was a man, and he had looked at Kitty Tailleur, and his sympathies, like Mr. Lucy's, had suffered an abominable perversion. His judgment, like Mr. Lucy's, had surrendered to the horrible charm. She said to herself bitterly, that she ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... from industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren negative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress upon the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the perversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability and refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... been fomented by combinations of men, who—careless of consequences and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion—have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... these parables in the defense of usury is as flagrant a perversion of the truth as the famous quotation to prove that Paul encouraged theft. "Let him that ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... However, every man may speak for himself, and I do not feel that your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against bigotry, and that I hold to be as legitimate as violence to the violent. When one considers what effect the perversion of the religious instinct has had during the history of the world; the bitter wars, Christian and Mahomedan, Catholic and Protestant; the persecutions, the torturings, the domestic hatreds, the petty spites, with ALL creeds equally blood-guilty, one cannot but ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... ladies seem to have an abhorrence (and a very just one, too) of wearing caps. When one considers for a moment that women wear the hair long, which Nature has given them both for an ornament and to keep the head warm, one is apt to wonder by what perversion of good taste they can be induced to enclose it in a cap. A mob-cap, a lace-cap, a low cap, a high cap, a flat cap, a cap with ribbons dangling loose, a cap with ribbons tied under the chin, a peak-cap, an ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... reducing all to one plebeian level, was most ingenious. The ingenuity indeed may be said to be Satanic, for it debased its victims morally as well as socially and physically. It worked by means of treachery, covetousness, perfidy, and the perversion of all natural affections. The trail of the serpent was over the whole system. For example, when the last Duke of Ormond arrived as lord lieutenant in 1703, the Commons waited on him with a bill 'for discouraging the ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... comes this difference of tone in works accepted by the same school? One difficulty of the historian who essays to account for the later phases of Buddhism is to apportion duly the influence of Indian and foreign elements. On the one hand, the Mahayana, whether we call it a development or perversion, is a product of Indian thought. To explain its trinities, its saviours, its doctrine of self sacrifice it is not necessary to seek abroad. New schools, anxious to claim continuity and antiquity, gladly retained as much of the old doctrine as they could. But on the other hand, Indian Buddhism ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... a very happy business to trace the decay of a great and noble idea; but one can catch a glimpse of the perversion of "grace" in the hands of our Puritan ancestors, when it became a combative thing, which instead of winning the enemies of the Lord by its patient sweetness, put an edge on the sword of holiness, and enabled the staunch Christian to hew the Amalekites hip and thigh; so that the word, which ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about Miranda and Ariel and that horrid old Caliban." For to reduce Shakespeare to the juvenile comprehension had been one of the tasks imposed on Joel by his new fealty, nor did it seem to him, as once it might have done, a base perversion of the matchless creations of the English tongue that in diluted and modified form, they should interest and entertain a little ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... the crucible of his spirit and give them forth as a significant and harmonious whole. The "poetry" of Goethe's autobiography—by far the best of autobiographies in the German language—must not be taken to imply concealment, perversion, substitution, or anything ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... wall awhile and watched; the sorrow of it all sank into us. There in the holiest place of all, according to their thinking, close to the emblems of deity, they had set this grievous perversion of the holy and the pure. Right on the topmost pinnacle of everything known as religious there they had enthroned it, and robed it in starlight and crowned it as queens are crowned. "Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... partisan, and yet like an honest one, who is no further warped from a correct judgment of passing affairs than must necessarily come from preconceived opinions. There is no management to work a conviction in his reader on this side or the other, still less any obvious perversion of fact. He evidently believes what he says, and this is the great point to be desired. We can make allowance for the natural influences of his position. Were he more impartial than this, the critic of the present day, by making allowance for ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... either no Spirit of God, no grace of God; or those who deny to them the name of saints forget the words of Him Who said: By their fruits ye shall know them; of Him Who said, too: That the unpardonable sin, the sin which shewed complete moral perversion, the sin against the Holy Spirit of God, was to attribute good deeds to bad motives, and say: He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... this very passage our Lord is explaining the sense of Holy Writ; therefore, its true meaning is not left to the private interpretation of every chance reader. It is, therefore, a grave perversion of the sacred text to adduce these words in vindication of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... they have become strong in their perversion; and they are alike brutal, sparing none, neither old nor young; and they delight in everything save that which is good; and the suffering of our women and our children upon all the face of this land doth exceed everything; yea, tongue cannot ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... best convey to the reader an idea of the entire perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people, by describing the public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption—an offence which was punished with death until quite recently. It did not occur till ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Another great perversion of truth has been the arraignment of the men who participated in the formation of the Confederacy and who bore arms in its defense, as the instigators of a controversy leading to disunion. Sectional issues appear conspicuously in the debates of the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... finally, and said in his sweetest manner (which is a very disagreeable one) that he had vast experience, and had "never known a man stand on his extreme rights and gain by it." This I felt to be a monstrous perversion of the case, and I was glad on the morning of the 9th to find that my reasons were very fairly stated in the Standard, the Telegraph, and the Daily News. Chamberlain had seen Escott of the Standard, and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... otherwise have been permitted freely to enjoy. There may, alas! be some cases, where the use of the Scriptures is altogether forbidden in school. But probably in almost every such case, it would be found, that it is from fear of its perversion to sect or party purposes, and not from any unwillingness to have the Bible used in ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... put her helpinge hande to this godly action, she shall finde as willinge subjectes of all sortes as any other prince in all Christendome. And as for the boastinge of your conversion of such multitudes of infidells, yt may justly be compted, rather a perversion, seeinge you have drawen them as it were oute of Sylla into Charibdis, that is to say, from one error into another. Nowe therefore I truste the time ys at hande when by her Majesties forwardnes in this enterprise, not only this obiection and suche like shalbe aunswered ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... references in Scripture to the vivifying effects of sunlight upon vegetation than we might have expected. The explanation is possibly to be found in the terrible perversion men had made of the benefits which came to them by means of this action of sunlight, by using them as an excuse for plunging into all kinds of nature-worship. Yet there are one or two allusions not without interest. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... becomes a creature more to be dreaded than a beast or venomous reptile, whichever he happens most to resemble, woman, parting with her womanhood, scarcely finds her counterpart even in the most noxious forms of earthly existence. She becomes, in her perversion, something that is unnatural and monstrous; something, so opposite to the Creator's design, as to suggest it only in caricature, or, more often, in fiendish mockery. The Gorgons, Sirens, and Harpies of the ancients are scarcely myths, for their fabled forms only too accurately portray, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... who accused the public schools in the form above mentioned has committed a lamentable error. For my part, I can say that the accusations awakened in me a desire to investigate the causes of immorality and of the perversion of customs which the said prelate, and we with him, all regret. According to those who have studied the mentality of the majority of our people, it is evident that superstition is the enemy which we all have to ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... love, though he may clothe it with pretexts and the false forms of marriage, he will have only permissible debauchery, he will know only the same immoral life in which I fell and caused my wife to fall, a life which we call the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... this seemed to him a point to his advantage. By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made all the germs of human lust ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... color, prevailing to a great extent in many parts of our country, particularly the northern and eastern, which, in its effect upon any one having an eye to a fitness of things in country buildings, is a monstrous perversion of good taste. That is the glaring red, made up of Venetian red, ochre, or Spanish brown, with doors and windows touched off with white. The only apology we have ever heard given for such a barbarism was, that it is a good, strong, and lasting color. We shall not go into an examination as to ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... the community, no matter how well and how carefully he has chosen his path in life, who would not fear to have his every action published and criticised, his every motive analysed unfairly, and the most mischievous construction placed upon each deed or thought found capable of perversion. How much more terrible would it be, then, for any man to know that his wife or mother was to be subjected to such ordeal; that for no fault committed, for nothing but the delectation of an unscrupulous scoundrel and his admirers, a tender and sensitive ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... doubted whether Addison ever filled up his original delineation. He describes his knight as having his imagination somewhat warped; but of this perversion he has made very little use. The irregularities in Sir Roger's conduct seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual rusticity, and that negligence which solitary ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... might be greater if it were dissociated from attempts at perversion," submitted Mitri with a show of ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... decency. Even though they had no respect for the works of man, we thought at least they would spare the works of God, the most sacred symbols of divine revelation to suffering humanity. But yesterday there occurred in this city a performance which for shameless insolence and blasphemous perversion exceeds anything but the wildest flight of a devil's imagination, and reveals the bosses of the Labor Trust as wanton defilers of everything that decent people ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was, and what she was doing ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... pardons no revolutions but her own, looked with horror on the turmoil in France and, misled by Burke and the nobles of the realm, forced the two nations into war. Even Pitt saw a blessing in this at first; because the sudden zeal for fighting a foreign nation—which by some horrible perversion is generally called patriotism—might turn men's thoughts from their own to their neighbors' affairs, and so prevent ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Sending her out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my being staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian's declining to commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word, I saw in this Miss Havisham ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... pleasure or pain, may be taken as the test of the goodness or badness of an action, the phraseology is so misleading, and so liable to frustrate the practical objects of the moralist, that it is desirable, if possible, to find terms not equally lending themselves to misinterpretation and perversion. Let us now, then, consider whether we are supplied with such terms in the phrases 'perfection' or 'development' of 'character.' It is a noble idea of human action to suppose that its end is the perfection of individual men, or the development of their various ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... co-operation on the part of the governed, it must have broken down long ago. Any system of race domination is unnatural, and can be kept up only by active coercion through a foreign-recruited public, service invested with large powers, however much it may he helped by the perversion of mentality shaping the education of the youth of the country. The foreign recruited service must necessarily be very highly paid. This creates a wrong standard for the Indian recruited officials also. Military ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... That we do deplore the perversion of the power of God, as men and Christians, and believe it highly commendable to this, the only true society of Christian principles, to associate and connect ourselves with all churches, of every denomination, and with all societies, not for the purpose of supporting them, but ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... prostitution of the great natural principle of Gender. Such base revivals of the ancient infamous forms of Phallicism tend to ruin mind, body and soul, and the Hermetic Philosophy has ever sounded the warning note against these degraded teachings which tend toward lust, licentiousness, and perversion of Nature's principles. If you seek such teachings, you must go elsewhere for them—Hermeticism contains nothing for you along these lines. To the pure, all things are pure; to the base, ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... beside faith. For faith desires to be the only service of God, and will grant this name and honor to no other work, except in so far as faith imparts it, as it does when the work is done in faith and by faith. This perversion is indicated in the Old Testament, when the Jews left the Temple and sacrificed at other places, in the green parks and on the mountains. This is what these men also do: they are zealous to do all works, but this chief work of faith they ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... strange feeling to be hunting down a fellow-creature; for, after all, that unhappy woman was of our own kind and nature; endowed like ourselves with an immortal soul to be saved, she felt, and thought, and reflected like ourselves. It is true that a strange perversion of human nature had brought her near to the nature of the wolf, and that some great mystery overshadowed her being. No doubt a wandering life had obliterated the moral sense in her, and even almost effaced the human ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... understood as an exoneration, by intentionally distorting what was said into an implication that Hooker was so besotted as to be incapable of command. What I have written of his marching the army to this field and to the field of Gettysburg is a full answer to such unnecessary perversion. Let these would-be friends of Hooker remember that this calumny is of their own making, not mine. I am as sorry for it, as they ought to be. If the contempt expressed in the resolutions they passed had been silent, instead of boisterous, ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... East,—two of them payments of money known to be legal, and the other perfectly illegal, and which has a name exactly expressing it in the manner our language does. It is necessary that your Lordships should see that Mr. Hastings has made use of a perversion of the names of authorized gifts to cover the most abominable and prostituted bribery. The first of those presents is known in the country by the name of peshcush: this peshcush is a fine paid, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the remembrance, but the belief that he acted as his duty enjoined? Would you rashly bereave him of this belief? Would you restore him to himself, and convince him that he was instigated to this dreadful outrage by a perversion of his organs, or ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix and perilously near commonplace. Instead of making to Wordsworth the wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysic into considering poetry as a Ding an sich and deducing therefrom the proposition that poetry must employ ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... be seen under the microscope, but its organic connection is shown, indeed, by evidence: serious affections of the brain and all so-called mental diseases, to the best of my belief, show themselves first of all in the perversion of ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence |
