"Pervert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continuance of the masses in behalf of his father's soul. The Directory replies (December 5, 1791): "considering that the motives which have determined the petitioner in his declaration are a pretense of good feeling under which there is hidden an illusion powerless to pervert a sound mind, the Directory decides that the application of the sieur ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... And then the promised gift deny, Be his who willed the prince should fly. When weapons clash and heroes bleed, With elephant and harnessed steed, Ne'er, like the good, be his to fight Whose heart allowed the prince's flight. Though taught with care by one expert May he the Veda's text pervert, With impious mind on evil bent, Whose voice approved the banishment. May he with traitor lips reveal Whate'er he promised to conceal, And bruit abroad his friend's offence, Betrayed by generous confidence. No wife of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers of Flamineo and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and as we read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is suffered to stand between their lust and its accomplishment. They override the law by violence, or pervert its action ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... necessary instruments of labor, except by the intervention of the State?" So that if it becomes necessary to revolutionize the country, I also will force my way into the halls of legislation. I also will pervert the law, and make it perform in my behalf and at your expense the very act for which ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... Yet because de Quincey was an opium-fiend, Poe a drunkard and Oscar Wilde a pervert, it does not follow that every clever writer is unfit for decent society. Even if he were, his popularity would not suffer. Few things help a man's public reputation so much as his private vices. Don't you think you ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... when he was appointed to play before the court the part of Orosmanes. Even Louis XV, had been prejudiced against him. But that king, who possessed judgment, intelligence, and a natural taste that nothing could pervert, appeared astonished that any person should have formed so ill an opinion of the new actor, and said—"Il m'a fait pleurer, mot qui ne pleure guere."—He has drawn tears from me, 'albeit unused to the melting mood.' This expression was sufficient. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... publicks being impos'd on, this is to give notice that the book lately published in 4to. is very imperfect and uncorrect, in so much that above thirty lines are omitted in several places, and many gross errors committed, which pervert the sense." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... party does not propose to interfere with your constitutional rights. I have no doubt that the administration of Mr. Lincoln will carry out the doctrines of the Chicago platform; but not the platform as you pervert it. Sir, it will convince the southern people that all the things said about us are unfounded. What, then, will be the fate of hundreds of politicians in the southern states who have stirred their people up ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... unheeded. The free Lybian, in his scorching deserts, was as much a slave when he rushed, in the wild chase, upon the king of beasts, as is his unhappy offspring before our laws cleave to him. God creates no slaves. The laws of man do oftentimes pervert the best gifts of nature, and wage an impious warfare against her decrees. But you can discover what is of the earth and what is from above. You may take man at his birth, and by an adequate system make him a slave, a brute, a demon. This is man's work. The ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... whose motive to this study is nothing better, and who have the further disadvantage of becoming a nuisance very often to society, in proportion to the progress they make. The former do not improve their reading to any good purpose; the latter pervert it to a very bad one, and grow in impertinence as they increase in learning. I think I have known most of the first kind in England, and most of the last in France. The persons I mean are those who read to talk, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... The change of tone is so great as to require the supposition of a change of subjects, and the Judaisers with whom the Apostle waged a neverending warfare, never did evangelistic work amongst the heathen as these men seem to have done, but confined themselves to trying to pervert converts already made. It was not their message but their spirit that was faulty. With whatever purpose of annoyance they were animated, they did 'preach Christ,' and Paul superbly brushes aside all that was antagonistic to him personally, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... use of the Law, and of human reason so far as it is able to interpret the Law, to resist them who speak falsely and pervert the right doctrine. Evidently, then, the doctrine of the Gospel does not oppose the doctrine of good works, but transcends it. For it reveals the source and inspiration of good works—not human reason, not human ability, but the grace ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... and request that a nolle prosequi should be ordered. The trial not coming on, he appeared accordingly, and made a very animated speech, in which he dwelt with deserved severity on the evils of the police system, and on the efforts of a corrupt press to pervert the public mind. He said he did not make these remarks to excite sympathy. He was not there to ask for mercy, but to demand justice. "And I would have you all to understand distinctly," continued ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... senseless words they wring From the pangs of thy despair; They may veil their eyes, but they cannot hide The sun's meridian glow; The heel of a priest may tread thee down And a tyrant work thee woe; But never a truth has been destroyed; They may curse it and call it crime; Pervert and betray, or slander and slay Its teachers for a time. But the sunshine aye shall light the sky, As round and round we run; And the Truth shall ever come uppermost, And ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... misuse, pervert, desecrate, violate, profane; maltreat, mistreat; revile, reproach, vilify, vituperate, malign, traduce; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... through her territory. But when more recently the commission appointed a sub-committee to study the lower Danube, and to report to it with such recommendations as would ensure the carrying out of the project in its integrity, it was found that some unseen influence had been at work to change and pervert the entire constitution and objects of ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... displayed was partly in consequence of an adequate retribution having failed to overtake her betrayer, and the family, then resident at Waddow, not having dealt out to him the just punishment of his deserts. Thus had she been permitted to pervert the proper influences and benevolent operations of this mystic disturber to her own mischievous propensities; and thenceforth a malignant spirit troubled the house, heretofore guarded by a saint of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... prayers for them, that God would vouchsafe to direct them in all their actions, and that we may under them lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. Wherefore we detest the Anabaptists and all turbulent men who cast off superior dominions and magistrates, pervert laws and judgments, make all goods common, and finally abolish or confound all orders and degrees which God hath constituted for honesty's ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... pervert whom I can trust told me that he had made advances to upward of one hundred men in the course of the last fourteen years, and that he had only once met with a refusal (in which case the man later on offered himself spontaneously) ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stroke of his compass, he might describe or divide a right line, had yet rather to do this in a circle or longer way, according to the constituted and fore-laid principles of his art: yet this rule of His He doth sometimes pervert, to acquaint the world with His prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason should question His power, and conclude He could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she only is; and therefore to ascribe His actions unto her, is to ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... political affairs. They have no right as officeholders to dictate the political action of their party associates or to throttle freedom of action within party lines by methods and practices which pervert every useful and justifiable ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... never gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arrogance'; and his son Robert was not less manly and independent. He was too sound in judgment; too conscious of his own worth, to sink into mean and abject servility. But this factor, perhaps more than anyone else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... first man, beguiled by the first woman, ate an apple, which God had forbidden him to touch. Who beguiled this woman into such folly? The devil. Who made the devil? God. But, why did God make this devil, destined to pervert mankind? This is unknown; it is a mystery which the Deity ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... Spirit of God is to oppose, corrupt, or pervert their testimony and to turn people away from them; and the judgments of Heaven are pronounced in that Word and by that Spirit against such as turn away from the truth unto fables. They shall have their part in the lake ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... all combined to direct immigration to the Northern section; and with the increase of its preponderance appeared more and more distinctly a tendency in the Federal Government to pervert functions delegated to it, and to use them with ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... "You came here to pervert the exhortation of Karl Marx, and unite under the banner of envy and greed every ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... caused numerous controversies which spread over all Germany (Saxony, the cradle of the Reformation, becoming the chief battlefield), and threatened to undo completely the blessed work of Luther, to disrupt and disintegrate the Church, or to pervert it into a unionistic or Reformed sect. Especially these discreditable internal dissensions were a cause of deep humiliation and of anxious concern to all loyal Lutherans. To the Romanists and Reformed, however, who united in predicting the impending collapse of Lutheranism, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... testimony of my own feelings, the miseries of Clithero appeared in some degree fantastic and groundless. A thousand conceivable motives might induce him to pervert or conceal the truth. If he were thoroughly known, his character might assume a new appearance; and what is now so difficult to reconcile to common maxims might prove perfectly consistent with them. I desire to restore him to peace; but a thorough ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... in return? Whiskey, to poison your bodies and pervert your minds; whiskey, to make you fierce beasts or dull brutes; whiskey, to make your eyes red and your hands unsteady; whiskey, to make your homes sties and yourselves fit occupants for them; whiskey, to make you beat your wives and children; ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... the "protocols" that appeared in various parts of the world in 1920 is based on the "documents" vouched for by the mysterious Sergius Nilus, and fortified by the irresponsible Jew-baiter and intellectual pervert Ippolit Lutostansky. ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... will then be fulfilling our legitimate duties. Yet, it so happens that we too know a few characters. But, as we can read, it behoves us to choose no other than wholesome works; for these will do us no harm! What are most to be shirked are those low books, as, when once they pervert the disposition, there ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... all the external advantages necessary to produce and perpetuate such a combination—that is the Greek conception of well-being; and it is because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs the body, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert the soul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labour and trade. "The arts that are called mechanical," says Xenophon, "are also, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our cities. For they spoil the bodies of workers and superintendents ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... and wishes to his keenly appreciating auditory, made proclamation among them, that the Demon who should invent a new vice, which, under the name and guise of Pastime, should be best calculated to seduce men from the paths of virtue, pervert their hearts, ruin them for earth and educate them for hell, should be awarded a crown of honor, with rank and prerogative second only to his own. He then, with many a gracious and encouraging word to incite in them a spirit ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... signifying "that which preserves the Practical Wisdom:" for what it does preserve is the Notion I have mentioned, i.e. of one's own true interest, For it is not every kind of Notion which the pleasant and the painful corrupt and pervert, as, for instance, that "the three angles of every rectilineal triangle are equal to two right angles," but only those ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... "Comus" we read of a certain potion which has the power to pervert all the senses of everyone who drinks it. Nothing is apprehended truly. Sight and hearing and taste are all disordered, and the victim is all unconscious of the confusion. The deadly draught is the minister ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... luxury and profligacy; time that the door was shut in the face of invading vulgarity. Creation has not agonized in bloody sweat through countless ages of suffering and achievement that those who possess the highest opportunities for doing good should pervert those opportunities into a mere platform for the display of a harmful badness. Evolution was not aiming at Belgravia when it set out on its long journey from the flaming mist of the nebula. We cannot suppose that Nature is content with the egoism of the social butterfly. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... endeavor to explain natural phenomena by supernatural theories, and while they do not assign preternatural powers to witches and demons, they yet persist in attempting to pervert facts of science, and delude themselves with faith in some supernatural force. The clergy state that the physician cures disease through the mediation of God, the physician merely playing the part of the agent of God, through whom the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of either of these, but rather of intermixtures of premeditation and invention, notes and memory. So as the exercise fitteth not the practice, nor the image the life; and it is ever a true rule in exercises, that they be framed as near as may be to the life of practice; for otherwise they do pervert the motions and faculties of the mind, and not prepare them. The truth whereof is not obscure, when scholars come to the practices of professions, or other actions of civil life; which when they set into, this want is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... who pervert the king's true bent, The white crow's part who play, Have slain their thousands innocent, And slay, and ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... Mrs. Rook is a coarse presuming woman. She may pervert your letter to some use of her own, which you ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... emptiness of her life, and come back to seek the solace of her children's love. Let us care for them meanwhile. They have no other kindred. Think of our sweet Henriette—so rich, so beautiful, so over-intelligent—growing from child to woman in the care of servants, who may spoil and pervert her even by their ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... to those funds the very money which they derived from the negro slave trade; who, while they professed to execrate white man slavery, perpetrated the same barbarities upon their brethren of a different colour and caste. How strangely does sin pervert the understandings of men, who arrogate to themselves the highest grade of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... on or oppress, ruin, damage, upon, persecute, slander, defame, injure, pervert, victimize, defile, malign, prostitute, vilify, disparage, maltreat, rail at, violate, harm, misemploy, ravish, vituperate, ill-treat, misuse, reproach, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... instructions. Had Lord Stanley acted with prudence he would have left much to Wilmot's judgment; but just before he had dilated with vast perspicacity on the tendency of governors to act in behalf of the colonists, to forget imperial interests, to misapply the funds and pervert the labor belonging to the crown. The precision of his injunctions left no alternative but to obey. Had Wilmot at once declared the impracticability of Lord Stanley's schemes he might have been recalled, but the responsibility of an utter failure ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... absolution, according to the rules of the Church." The Duchess, while stating her full confidence in the orthodoxy of the Prince, expressed at the same time her fears that attempts might be made in the future by his new connexions "to pervert ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... who, when more easily, and with one stroke of his compass, he might describe or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art: yet this rule of his he doth some- times pervert, to acquaint the world with his preroga- tive, lest the arrogancy of our reason should question his power, and conclude he could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... stood amidst a field of the ghastly dead and shrieking wounded, when the tide of a great battle raged fiercest and strongest, his foothold bathed in the life-blood of his comrades. Such scenes ever tend to pervert the kinder tendencies of our nature, and to render the mind adamantine in its manifestations; nor were his less susceptible to these influences than others. When first he entered the ranks of the army, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... last words of Francesco Spira, an Italian lawyer and a pervert, whose terrible death, in the agonies of remorse and despair, made a deep and lasting impression on ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... of learning has hitherto been able to dissipate. I have established the truth of the Mosaical account, by evidence which no transcription can corrupt, no negligence can lose, and no interest can pervert. I have shewn that the universe bears witness to the inspiration of its historian, by the revolution of its orbs and the succession of its seasons; that the stars in their courses fight against[1083] incredulity, that the works of GOD ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the house, as he helped himself to chicken and tongue. 'We are not Highlanders. It's dangerous to make diet too much a matter of theory. Your example is infectious; first the twins; now Miss Hood. Edith, do you propose to become a pervert to porridge?' ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... the first that cast reproaches upon us; in order to please which nation, some others undertook to pervert the truth, while they would neither own that our forefathers came into Egypt from another country, as the fact was, nor give a true account of our departure thence. And indeed the Egyptians took many occasions to hate us and envy us: in the first place, because our ancestors had ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favor and flattery, pervert ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... inferior officers are, on account of the great distance, naturally exercised there with more than ordinary violence. Under all absolute governments, there is more liberty in the capital than in any other part of the country. The sovereign himself can never have either interest or inclination to pervert the order of justice, or to oppress the great body of the people. In the capital, his presence overawes, more or less, all his inferior officers, who, in the remoter provinces, from whence the complaints of the people are less likely to reach him, can exercise their tyranny with much more ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... because the guilt has been remitted in the Sacrament, by which believers are born again; but it remains, because it produces desires against which believers contend. Our adversaries know that Luther believes and teaches thus, and while they cannot reject the matter, they nevertheless pervert his words, in order by this artifice to crush an ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... The dignitary most respected in these towns is the Padre (or Priest), who is looked upon as sacred; and, when so inclined, this class of men have the power of accomplishing much good; but, oftentimes, they pervert this power, setting bad examples in their mode of life, and offering wicked counsel. However, under the management of the present bishop, who is a very exemplary man, these things are being changed. The old ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... cipher even, has power to change the total. The strength of wisdom in the majority of a nation may be more than sufficient to-day to counteract the folly of the unit; but there is always the chance that the folly of the individual may in time prevail against the experience of the wise, and pervert the nation. At all events, we ought to consider such possibilities before we hold ourselves free to do as we please in ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... be difficult to fittingly characterize this scandalous effort to pervert a great State trial into an instrumentality for the successful exploitation of a commercial venture which was by no means free from the elements ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... that Scott did, or did not, pervert the ballad, and turn a false Elliot into a false Scott version, cannot be obtained unless new documents bearing ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... case, it may arise from a want of a proper and well-directed exercise, which alone can make it strong and ready. Besides, that ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province. These causes produce different opinions upon everything which is an object of the understanding, without inducing us to suppose that there are no settled ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... wine who (l) misunderstand the sacred scriptures and pervert them, and through strong drink they make a wrong use of profane wisdom and the wiles of the dialecticians, which are to be called, not so much wiles as figures, that is, symbols, so-called, and images, which quickly pass away and are ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... in the presence of white British troops he had been robbed, knocked about, and kicked by armed kaffirs. I know beforehand that the officer responsible for this noble and civilised act will attempt to pervert the truth, because I am assured that His Excellency cannot sanction this method of warfare. But this case is personally known to me, and in my opinion, the declaration of a dying man ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... proved to me, too, that the absence of a sense need not dull the mental faculties and does not distort one's view of the world, and so I reason that blindness and deafness need not pervert the inner order of the intellect. I know that if there were no odours for me I should still possess a considerable part of the world. Novelties and surprises would abound, adventures would thicken ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... "salvation was confirmed" by the preaching of the Gospel, "God also bearing witness with signs, and wonders, and divers miracles."[12] But those things which we are told were seals of the Gospel, shall we pervert to undermine the faith of the Gospel? Those things which were designed to be testimonials of the truth, shall we accommodate to the confirmation of falsehood? It is right, therefore, that the doctrine, which, according to the evangelist, claims ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... without a cook, their most usual fare would be rustic viands such as those thou now offer me; so that, friend Sancho, let not that distress thee which pleases me, and do not seek to make a new world or pervert knight-errantry." ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... party system will exclude from active politics all who are not loyal to the "machine," and are not strong enough to break it. But a host of public officers—inspectors, clerks, etc.—paid out of the public funds will do more than pervert representative government: they will make it subordinate to the permanent official class; and bureaucracy, once firmly in the saddle, is harder to get rid of than the absolutism of kings, or the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... that, as Michelet himself has said, this last act of the dreadful drama is but seldom represented. But enough may be done, without actual or conscious guilt, to pervert the feelings, and, above all, to destroy the peace and the unity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... discernment of his Praetorian praefects, he often placed himself by their side on the seat of judgment. The acute penetration of his mind was agreeably occupied in detecting and defeating the chicanery of the advocates, who labored to disguise the truths of facts, and to pervert the sense of the laws. He sometimes forgot the gravity of his station, asked indiscreet or unseasonable questions, and betrayed, by the loudness of his voice, and the agitation of his body, the earnest vehemence with which he maintained ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... magistrate in a Christian land must expect to be governed, or to be held infamous forever. Nay, more: he does not recognize at all those fundamental principles of the Constitution and Declaration which are stated in plain terms in the first lines of both. He did worse than torture and pervert language: he reversed its meaning. He denied the undoubted facts of history. He denied the settled truths of science. He slandered the memory of the founders of the government and framers of the Declaration. He was ready to cover the most glorious page of the history of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... any other sentence is capable of correction, but the dead man cannot be recalled to life. Let the ensigns of your power be terrible to drivers-away of cattle, to thieves and robbers; but let innocence rejoice when she sees the tokens of approaching succour. Let no one pervert your will by bribes: the sword of justice is sheathed when gold is taken. Receive then for this Indiction the dignity of Count in such and such a Province. So use your power that you may be able to defend ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... and hence he need not consume time over that matter, but would proceed at once to announce as his text, the following passage of Holy Writ: 'Oh, full of all subtlety and mischief, thou child of the devil, how long wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord.' Having repeated the text with emphasis, he looked over the congregation very gravely, and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you will perceive that I have chosen a pretty hard text. Now it is not polite for people to go out of meeting during ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... last scene—that in the prison—is the most powerful of all. Never was madness more touchingly delineated, or woman's nature more truly developed;—that nature so little understood by those who are so prone to pervert it, and whose triumphs over its virtues are always achieved by means of the excess of that propensity to love, and to believe in the truth of the object beloved, which is one of the most beautiful characteristics in woman; though, wo to her! it is ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... views of the nature, character, and objects of the Government and the value of the Union, I shall steadily oppose the creation of those institutions and systems which in their nature tend to pervert it from its legitimate purposes and make it the instrument of sections, classes, and individuals. We need no national banks or other extraneous institutions planted around the Government to control or strengthen it in opposition to the will of its authors. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... temporary harm for the moment, but those who injure the character by their praise, aye, and by their flattery undermine the morals, act like those slaves who do not steal from the bin, but from the seed corn.[393] For they pervert the disposition, which is the seed of actions, and the character, which is the principle and fountain of life, by attaching to vice names that belong properly only to virtue. For as Thucydides says,[394] in times of faction and war "people change ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... uncleanliness of its inhabitants; and I regretted that it had not fallen to the lot of civilized men. I was wrong no doubt: it is just that those should be most favored by their common mother, who are least disposed to pervert her gifts, or to give the preference to advantages which are factitious, and often very frivolous. We quitted with regret this charming spot, and soon came to another large village, which our guide informed us was called Kathlapootle, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... it proceed with relentless persistency and profound cunning to instil into the nation the demoniacal obsession of power-worship and world-dominion, to modify and pervert the mentality—indeed the very fibre and moral substance—of the German people, a people which until misled, corrupted and systematically poisoned by the Prussian ruling caste, was and deserved to be an honoured, valued and welcome member of the ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment and pervert all equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord and say, Is ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... order according to his deserts. These protestations were reenforced by an ardent letter from Countess Tolstoy, the wife of the great author, who reproached Andreyev for having so complacently painted such sombre pictures, with such low and violent scenes, all of which tended to pervert youth. The writers were not the only ones to take offence. Two important Russian newspapers organized a sort of inquiry, and they published many of the answers received from the young people of both sexes, but these were all ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... loss of faith or apostasy from the true religion. We know that the children of Seth were good till they married the children of Cain, and then they also became wicked; for, remember, there is always more likelihood that the bad will pervert the good, than that the good will convert the bad. Besides the disputes occasioned between husband and wife by the diversity of their religion, their families and relatives, being also of different religions, will ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... chastity is quickly overcome. [Rom. 13:12 f.] On the other hand, the holy Apostle Paul calls fasting, watching and labor godly weapons, with which unchastity is mastered; but, as has been said above, these exercises must do no more than overcome unchastity, and not pervert nature. ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... position, they can not but secure the confidence and good will of the people and the Government, which they can only lose when, leaping from their legitimate sphere, they attempt to control the legislation of the country and pervert the operations of the Government ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... that Battista makes a very excellent watchdog," he said, and you would have thought him amused, as if at the foolish subterfuge of some little child. "You may be right to dislike him. He knows no French, so that it may not be yours to pervert and bribe him with promises of what you will do if he assists you to escape; but you will see that this very quality which renders him detestable to you renders ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... command. But I have responded gladly and with a resolution that has grown warmer and more confident as the issues have grown clearer and clearer. It is now plain that they are issues which no man can pervert unless it be wilfully. I am bound to fight for them, and happy to fight for them as time and circumstance have revealed them to me as to all the world. Our enthusiasm for them grows more and more irresistible as they stand out in more and ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... raised his eyes In tears, for grief lay heavy at his heart. "And is it thus in courtly life," he cries, "That man to man acts a betrayer's part? And dares he thus the gifts of Heaven pervert, Each social instinct, and sublime desire? Hail, Poverty! if honour, wealth, and art, If what the great pursue and learn'd admire, Thus dissipate and ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... speak. Perpetual opposition is a dishonourable aim in politics; and a man who mingles in political development with no intention of taking on responsible tasks unless he gets all his particular formulae accepted is a pervert, a victim of Irish bad example, and unfit ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... pained," said the minister gravely. "I knew not that my brother had been a pervert from the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... and despise the blessed revelation of forgiveness for sinners through Jesus, the Lamb of God. Not always will cold philosophy, and erratic enthusiasm, and fanaticism fierce and malignant, conspire to corrupt and pervert the gospel itself, turning even the streams from the fountain of life into waters of bitterness and poison. No, no; the time will come when the sun, in his daily journey round the renovated world, shall waken with his morning beam in every human dwelling the voice of joyful, thankful, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... true of the heat and light from the sun of heaven, which is love. When the heat, or love, from that sun flows into good, as it does in good men and angels, it makes their good fruitful; but when it flows into the evil it produces a contrary effect, for their evils either suffocate it or pervert it. In like manner when the light of heaven flows into the truths of good it imparts intelligence and wisdom; but when it flows into the falsities of evil it is turned into insanities and phantasies of various kinds. Thus in every ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... pontiffs of science. Who pervert young people by laying down such rules of hygiene? Who pervert women by devising and teaching them ways by which ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... license and debauchery, and the murder with the justifications of its necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of military exploits, the worship of the flag, the patriotic sentiments, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on, does more in one year to pervert men's minds than thousands of robberies, murders, and arsons perpetrated during hundreds of years by individual men under the ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... use of ciphers and abbreviations was rigorously proscribed; and as Justinian recollected, that the perpetual edict had been buried under the weight of commentators, he denounced the punishment of forgery against the rash civilians who should presume to interpret or pervert the will of their sovereign. The scholars of Accursius, of Bartolus, of Cujacius, should blush for their accumulated guilt, unless they dare to dispute his right of binding the authority of his successors and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... extracts from Hesiod illustrate the certainty with which Justice was believed to overtake and punish those who pervert her ways, while the good are followed by blessings. They also show that the crimes of one ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... We may substitute stimulants to the senses for elevation to the principle, or softening of the heart. By abandoning its direction to the most volatile and licentious of the community, we may render it an instrument of evil instead of good, and pervert the powers of genius, the magic of art, the fascinations of beauty, to the destruction instead of the elevation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... men have an implicit notion of it, and are sensible, that they owe obedience to government merely on account of the public interest; and at the same time, that human nature is so subject to frailties and passions, as may easily pervert this institution, and change their governors into tyrants and public enemies. If the sense of common interest were not our original motive to obedience, I would fain ask, what other principle is ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... "the soul that sins shall die." If you will read the whole chapter and seriously consider it, and pray to God through Jesus Christ to open your understanding, that you may understand the scriptures, you would not misappply and pervert them as I fear you do. In your speaking at the house of mourning, you began and spake very eloquently at first upon death; then you brought forward the same ideas, with respect to death, as you did before at the grave. I do not remember that you, ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... GOD in the *great *assembly stands *Bagnadath-el Of Kings and lordly States, Among the gods* on both his hands. *Bekerev. He judges and debates. 2 How long will ye *pervert the right *Tishphetu With *judgment false and wrong gnavel. Favouring the wicked by your might, Who thence grow bold and strong? 3 *Regard the *weak and fatherless *Shiphtu-dal. *Dispatch the *poor mans cause, 10 ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... conference—the Recess Committee. How has he been met? Mr. Redmond, a member of that Committee, as later of the Land Conference, has, here again, succumbed to Mr. Dillon, who seeks to defeat co-operation between farmers, in the interests of his disciples; whilst Mr. Russell, with the hectic zeal of a pervert, has refused Ireland's share of the new Development Grant in order to spite Sir ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... started her about the world. While heeding Washington's warnings and the popular interpretation of the Monroe doctrine to keep the people of other nations from getting a foothold on this continent, we shall not pervert their spirit by stubbornly refusing to improve an opportunity to extend and increase our power and our commerce. Every extension of our territory hitherto made has been resisted by a spirit the same in essence as that which now timidly opposes our improving the wonderful opportunities ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... that gift of seeing life and its agents in the barren white light of his own purposes which so simplified things for Captain Hahn. He was a son of that mesalliance of nations which was Austria-Hungary Slavs, their slipping grasp clutching at eternity, Transylvanians, with pervert Latin ardors troubling their blood, had blended themselves in him; and he was young. Life for him was a depth not a surface, as for Captain Hahn; facts were but the skeleton of truth; glamour clad them and made them vital. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... campaign began in real earnest—a life of pleasure, a life of utter selfishness and self-indulgence, which would go far to pervert the strongest mind, tarnish the purest nature. To dress and be admired—that was what Lesbia's life meant from morning till night. She had no higher or nobler aim. Even on Sunday mornings at the fashionable church, where the women sat on one side of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... when not dependent on mere habit and inculcation, have their root much more in the inclinations than in the intellect, it is a necessary condition to the triumph of the moral bias that it should first pervert the understanding. Every erroneous inference, though originating in moral causes, involves the intellectual operation of admitting insufficient evidence as sufficient; and whoever was on his guard against all kinds of inconclusive evidence which can be mistaken ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... There was discipline in that man's camp, as long as he was looking. But Ayisha followed the woman out, and whether she herself found Shammas Abdul, or whether she contrived to pervert the junior wife, Grim presently became aware of that move to summon forth ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... of Chili, thus easily begun, was not easily continued. Three brothers, Jose Miguel, Juan Jose, and Luis Carreras, and their sister, styled the Anne Boleyn of Chili, determined to pervert the public weal to their own aggrandisement. Winning their way into popularity, they overturned the national congress that had been established in June, and in December set up a new junta, with Jose Miguel Carrera at its head. A dismal period of misrule ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... say that Dr. Strachan was utterly incapable of seeing more than one side of any question involving the interests of himself and his church. When his cause was a just one, who so fond as he of appealing to the majesty of the law. When he wished to pervert the law to his own purposes, who so apt at enjoining a disregard therefor.[7] There is abundant reason for believing that he was the original instigator of the Gourlay prosecutions. They were at all events carried on by his satellites, and fostered by his fullest concurrence and approval. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... "If a book be a good book, the worst of us can not do it much harm; nor do I believe there are more than a few in the profession who would condescend to give a false opinion upon the work of a rival; though doubtless personal feeling may pervert the judgment." ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... must lose no time over this. Can't you manage to get some articles in the other papers hinting that at the last election we bribed all the voters in the county, and that we gave out enough contracts to simply pervert the whole constituency. Imply that we poured the public money into this county in bucketsful and that we are bound to do it again. Let Drone have plenty of material of this sort and he'll draw off every honest unbiased vote ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert even the natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in an hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... alleged that these brewers raised and spent a fund exceeding $1,000,000, to influence the election of a United States senator and thirty-six members of the lower House of Congress and to pervert to selfish and sordid purposes ...
— Government By The Brewers? • Adolph Keitel
... argue, that, although they have good feelings towards us, and would do any thing for us, if we were out of their sight and out of the hearing of their slaves, yet to admit us into their circles would be to pervert the present order of society, and the happiness of the good white citizens of the country. These are generally bible men, such as hold forth the true oracles of God; yet deny him, in their actions and words, the supreme control over all his creatures. There is hardly ever an action ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... favored opinions in religion and government. The boasted system of Prussia is only a prop and ally of the existing order of things. In France, Napoleon makes the press, which has become in civilized countries an educator of the people, the mere instrument of his will. Tyrants do not hesitate to pervert schools and the press, learning and literature, to the support of tyranny. But with us the press and the school are free; and this freedom, denied through fear in other countries, is the best evidence of the stability of our institutions. ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... it is very important to forbid these offices to persons who are under obligations, which induce an insatiable greed and presumption; and, to fill that yawning void, the wealth of all the Indias is insignificant. The worst is, that they pervert a man, and lead him astray by their influence. If I were to recount here in detail all the difficulties which they occasion, I should have to take twice the space. In short, everyone there is lamenting; and these people come in smiles, and even negotiating for the honors which belong to others, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... up beyond her bounds, for their own scraps and advantage. The third sort, is of those that may be accounted the left hands of courts; persons that are full of nimble and sinister tricks and shifts, whereby they pervert the plain and direct courses of courts, and bring justice into oblique lines and labyrinths. And the fourth, is the poller and exacter of fees; which justifies the common resemblance of the courts of justice, to the bush ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... this be sure— To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. If then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labour must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil; Which ofttimes may succeed so as perhaps Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb His inmost counsels from their destined aim. But see! the angry Victor hath recalled His ministers ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... might, we fear, be applied to Bacon. The influence of Waller's talents, manners, and accomplishments, died with him; and the world has pronounced an unbiassed sentence on his character. A few flowing lines are not bribe sufficient to pervert the judgment of posterity. But the influence of Bacon is felt and will long be felt over the whole civilised world. Leniently as he was treated by his contemporaries, posterity has treated him more leniently still. Turn where we may, the trophies of that mighty intellect ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in this kind, he shall be accounted a most valiant man, for [1434]Tam inter epulas fortis vir esse potest ac in bello, as much valour is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains, and carpet knights will make this good, and prove it. Thus they many times wilfully pervert the good temperature of their bodies, stifle their wits, strangle nature, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light, from them, and to draw them away from it. Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so much of it as it is profitable to them to know. Every ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Interpretations on them; so that the same Actions may represent a Man as hypocritical and designing to one, which make him appear a Saint or Hero to another. He therefore who looks upon the Soul through its outward Actions, often sees it through a deceitful Medium, which is apt to discolour and pervert the Object: So that on this Account also, he is the only proper Judge of our Perfections, who does not guess at the Sincerity of our Intentions from the Goodness of our Actions, but weighs the Goodness of our Actions by the Sincerity ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... he said, and his face darkened as he spoke; "the newspapers are simply the hired mouthpieces of power; the devil's advocates of modern civilization; their influence is always at the service of the highest bidder; it is their duty to suppress or pervert the truth, and they do it thoroughly. They are paid to mislead the people under the guise of defending them. A century ago this thing began, and it has gone on, growing worse and worse, until now the people laugh at the opinions of the press, and doubt ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... sea and land to make proselytes; and after they have gained them, they are afraid of them, for their respective antecedents are so different, that it is impossible for them to think together. They get the submission of a poor deluded pervert, but he gets nothing in return from them but a fictitious salvation. They gain him; but he was lost the kind regard and sympathy of friends he had before, and with it all that once was dear to him; and he ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... faith. [13:9]But Saul, [called] also Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looking steadily at him [13:10]said, O full of all deceit and all craft, son of a devil, enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? [13:11]And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you shall be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell upon him a mist and darkness, and going about ...
— The New Testament • Various
... importance. The "mystery of iniquity" in Paul's time, and since his day, did not, and does not, consist in making too much of God's ordinances in their purity and proper use. That cannot be done, any more than you can intelligently love the Bible too much, or the Sabbath. But, to pervert them, or to make additions to them, or to rely upon them wholly, is Romanism. But can men make too much of having a seal on a deed? Is the deed good for anything without the seal? Can they make too ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... it for a moment," answered my father, cheerfully. "Nor have I introduced them. But if you fear they'll convert—pervert—subvert—invert your parishioners and turn 'em into papists, I can reassure you. For in the first place thirty men, or thirty thousand, of whom only one can open his mouth, are, for proselytizing, equal to one man and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... System of Deception and Hypocrisy.—Has any man a right to pervert the English language, by fixing new meanings to words, entirely different from and contrary to those in common use? If he knows the meaning of the words he uses, and uses them to convey a contrary meaning, he is a deceiver. The name God, used as a proper name, in the English tongue, means "the Supreme ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... not to their own vices, but to the machinations of an angry god, and they looked on favours granted to strangers as a sacrilege. Had not the Greeks brought their divinities with them? Did they not pervert the simple country-folk, so that they associated the Greek religion with that of their own country? Money was scarce; Amasis had been obliged to debit the rations and pay of his mercenaries to the accounts of the most venerated Egyptian temples—those of Sais, Heliopolis, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... people, who have, as we say, been educated, but who have not been taught the principles and habits which lead to honorable living; the thousands in our great cities who are driven into surroundings which pervert and undermine character. And worse still, the good, instead of uniting to labor for a better state of things, misunderstand and thwart one another. They divide into parties, are jealous and contentious, and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... race had ever yet reached the dignity of an inventor. It is not easy to understand how a gentleman of the requisite qualifications to represent an intelligent constituency acceptably in the Congress of the United States could so palpably pervert the truth in a matter on which he could so easily have rightly informed himself. At the time when this statement was made, 1903, in Talbot County, Maryland, there was on the shelves of the Library of Congress a book[15] containing a chapter ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... St. Paul, either by threats, revilings, force, violence, fire, and faggot, we shall not be able to hook in any more of them to nibble at below. He dines commonly on counsellors, mischief-mongers, multipliers of lawsuits, such as wrest and pervert right and law and grind and fleece the poor; he never fears to want any of these. But who can endure to be ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... for life and death are simply indifferent to him. But such a defence as would be acceptable to his judges and might procure an acquittal, it is not in his nature to make. He will not say or do anything that might pervert the course of justice; he cannot have his tongue bound even 'in the throat of death.' With his accusers he will only fence and play, as he had fenced with other 'improvers of youth,' answering the Sophist ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... after this time, the fate of a woman, a school-teacher by profession, found guilty of heresy. In any case, the judges took effectual measures to forestall the deplorable consequences that might ensue from permitting the "Lutherans" to address the by-standers, and so pervert them from the orthodox faith. The hangman was instructed to pierce their tongue with a hot iron, or to cut it out altogether; just as, at a later date, the sound of the drum was employed to drown the last utterances of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... were regular Caste Hindus; courteous—for they have had no cause to fear the power of the Gospel—yet keen and argumentative. One of them had evidently read a good deal. He quoted from their classics; knew all about Mrs. Besant and the latest pervert to her views; and was up in the bewildering tangle of thought known as Hindu Philosophy. "Fog-wreaths of doubt, in blinding eddies drifted"—that is what it really is, but it is very difficult to ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... I expect to CONVERT or PERVERT you; if I could stagger you in ever so slight a degree I should be satisfied; nor fear to annoy me by severe criticisms, for I have had some hearty kicks from some of my best friends. If it would not be disagreeable to you to send me your opinion, I certainly ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... evening promenades in the French capital, or a dance in the groves of Montmorency. The old verbal tyranny of the French Academy, the painted wreaths sold at cemetery-gates, the colored plates of fashions, powdered hair, and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and insensibility to her unadulterated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
