"Pervert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pervert my meaning," said Mr. Hazlewood. "The neighbourhood has not been kind to Mrs. Ballantyne. She has been made to suffer. The Vicar's wife, for instance—a most uncharitable person. And my sister, your Aunt Margaret, too, in Great Beeding—she is what ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... we speak together, But we cannot speak when absent, Cannot send our voices from us To the friends that dwell afar off; Cannot send a secret message, But the bearer learns our secret, May pervert it, may betray it, May reveal it unto others." Thus said Hiawatha, walking In the solitary forest, Pondering, musing in the forest, On ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... 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 to their ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... lost, in the fresher incidents of those eventful seas. But the mariner, long after was known to shorten the watches of the night, by recounting scenes of mad enterprise that were thought to have occurred under his auspices. Rumour did not fail to embellish and pervert them, until the real character, and even name, of the individual were confounded with the actors of other atrocities. Scenes of higher and more ennobling interest, too, were occurring on the Western Continent, to efface the circumstances of a legend ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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. He had been transferred to the Italian front ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... death,[25] because his step-mother was believed: because Cassandra was not believed, Troy fell. Therefore, we ought to examine strictly into the truth of a matter, rather than {suffer} an erroneous impression to pervert our judgment. But, that I may not weaken {this truth} by referring to fabulous antiquity, I will relate to you a thing that happened within my ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... pernicious errors, they 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, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... not. I suppose your Marx didn't know the difference, although he is said to have married well, but bourgeois for centuries in Europe had meant middle-class. Just that and nothing more. Marx had no right to pervert an honest historic old word into something so ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... sedition and party rage. If momentary rays of glory break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time admonish us to lament that the vices of government should pervert the direction and tarnish the lustre of those bright talents and exalted endowments for which the favored soils that produced them have been so justly celebrated. From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism have ...
— The Federalist Papers
... recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long as we take no steps to ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... not turn upon the teacher, because, in the first place, he would have seen no reason why Tillie should wish to shield her, and, in the second, it was inconceivable that a teacher at William Penn should set out so to pervert the young whom trusting parents placed under her care. There never had been a novel-reading teacher at William Penn. The Board would as soon have ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... may be pleaded for the Roman method, that they are most fit to have charge of a thing, who least desire to pervert it to their own ends. And, doubtless, if we examine the aims which the nobles and the commons respectively set before them, we shall find in the former a great desire to dominate, in the latter merely a desire not to be dominated over, and hence a greater attachment to ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... to the nature of the case. But though the opinions of the generality of mankind, 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 ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... amiable and finished than the rest of her works; so I would have them bestow upon themselves all the additional beauties that art can supply them with; provided it does not interfere with disguise, or pervert those of nature. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... Many calamities have happened in the world, even on account of religion, yet the fatal consequences ought not to be charged to that divine institution which naturally breathes benevolence, gentleness and peace, but to the ignorance and corruption of human nature, which pervert and abuse it. Enthusiasts generally agree in two articles: they disclaim the power and authority of the civil magistrate, and mistake their own wild fancies, the fruits of a distempered brain, for the impulses of the Divine Spirit, both of which are big with the ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... come to pass, and ponder upon the oaths which thou didst take when thou didst carry away the money, and consider that if, after that, thou wrongly dishonour them by some tricks or sophistries, thou wouldst not be able to pervert them; for Heaven is too mighty to be deceived by any man." When Chosroes saw this message, he neither made any immediate answer nor did he dismiss Anastasius, but he ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... 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 could cultivate hashish, Mario? Sherlock Holmes' ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... gospel wrongly, and wrest it to its own destruction, those who set forth gospel principles are not responsible, unless, as has too often been the case with reference to this subject, the trumpet give an uncertain sound. And the world is too ready to pervert this truth, and does pervert it. Christians, if properly instructed, are so far from being disqualified to use amusements safely, the best qualified of all others to develop their highest uses, and to enjoy without abusing them. The world regards only the ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie. But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse and their true meaning difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify. One taking the sense too literally might pervert the truth and conceive blasphemies, and give God feet, and hands, and eyes, and human affections, such as anger, repentance, forgetfulness, ignorance, whereas these expressions are employed merely to accommodate the truth to the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... who had now declared himself as a convert,—I will say pervert if my readers wish it,—was no other than our young friend Florian. He came in one day and assured his sisters that he meant to be a Roman Catholic. They only laughed at him, and told him that he did not know what he was talking about. "Don't I though?" said Florian. "I've had no end of an argument ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... correspondence, must be plain to every reader of ordinary intelligence. No wonder that the advocates of the genuineness of these Epistles have called into requisition such an enormous amount of ingenuity and erudition to pervert the chronology. Pearson, as we have seen, spent six years in this service; and the learned Bishop of Durham has been engaged "off and on" for nearly thirty in the same labour. At the close of his long task he seems to have persuaded himself that he has ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... 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 the ...
— Government By The Brewers? • Adolph Keitel
... of psychoneurotics has perhaps been placed in a false light by the above discussions. It appears that the sexual behavior of the psychoneurotic approaches in predisposition to the pervert and deviates by just so much from the normal. Nevertheless, it is very possible that the constitutional disposition of these patients besides containing an immense amount of sexual repression and a predominant force of sexual impulse also possesses an ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... prevent each of these things being done by either Congresses or courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... almost the entire human psychology? This, surely: so far as these writers awaken an interest in the wild denizens of the field and wood, and foster a genuine love of them in the hearts of the young people, so far is their influence good; but so far as they pervert natural history and give false impressions of the intelligence of our animals, catering to a taste that prefers the fanciful to the true and the real, is their influence bad. Of course the great army of readers prefer this ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... 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 his opinion against ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in representing Egmont not as a married man with a large family of children but as a bachelor with a bourgeois sweetheart. Not that Schiller regarded the departure from history as reprehensible in itself. The dramatist has a right to pervert facts for the purpose of exciting sympathy for his hero; but in this case, Schiller argued, the effect is to degrade the character of Egmont and thus to alienate sympathy. Finally the review took exception to Egmont's vision of Freedom In the form of Claerchen; this, Schiller thought, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... 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 he sought guides. [13:12]Then the ...
— The New Testament • Various
... Asmodeus, to whom lustful qualities are assigned (Tobit vi. 14); Gen. iii. is probably referred to in Psalms of Solomon xvii. 49, "a serpent speaking with the words of transgressors, words of deceit to pervert wisdom." The Book of the Secrets of Enoch not only identifies Satan with the Serpent, but also describes his revolt against God, and expulsion from heaven. In the Jewish Targums Sammael, "the highest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... spake, "How long shall these thy words, like eddying winds Fall empty on the ear? Doth God pervert Justice and judgment? If thy way was pure, Thy supplication from an upright heart He would awake and make thy latter end More blest than thy beginning. For inquire Of ancient times, of History's honor'd ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." Had the man who wrote this story been a lawyer, and had he known how these would-be-Bible-believers, and at the same time geologists, would seek to pervert his meaning, he could not have more carefully worded his account. It is not possible for any man to express the idea of a total flood more definitely than this man has done. He does not merely say the hills were covered, but "all" the ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... offspring; as a friend, suspicious and ungrateful. As pride was the ruling passion of Rousseau, so was vanity beyond dispute the grand characteristic of Voltaire, (the proximity of Fernay may excuse my here comparing him with Rousseau,) and this passion induced him to pervert transcendent talents to the ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... invention, and, after fully explaining his wants 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 of emulation, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... upon the honour of your conduct! Offering to pervert me [the joke is that the gentleman is pressing the lady for her daughter's hand, not for her own]—perverting me from the road of virtue, in which I have trod thus long, and never made one trip—not one faux pas. Oh, consider it; what would ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... are drunken with 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 ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... 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 sectional ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... anything you have done, but seek after it only because you have nothing to do. It is the same in the enjoyments of love, in which you rather force than follow your inclinations, and are obliged to use arts, and even to pervert nature, to keep your passions alive. Thus is it that you instruct your followers—kept awake for the greatest part of the night by debaucheries, and consuming in drowsiness all the most useful part of the day. Though immortal, you are an outcast from ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... floods." He wrote to the King; he was at a loss to account for the "tempest that had come on him;" he could not understand what he had done to offend the country or Parliament; he had never "taken rewards to pervert justice, however he might be frail, and partake of the abuse of ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... 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
... Books, such as stir up to lust, to wantonness, such as teach idle, wanton, lascivious discourse, and such as has a tendency to provoke to profane drollery and Jesting; and lastly, such as tend to corrupt, and pervert the Doctrine of Faith and Holiness. All these things will eat as doth a canker, and will quickly spoil, in Youth, &c. those good beginnings that may be ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... 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 she only is; and therefore, to ascribe his actions unto her is ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... negro—not in their own unhappy country, but after they have been removed from it and enslaved in your Christian land, made the victim of the barbarizing demon of civilized powers, and has all this character, if it were possible to corrupt it, and his feelings, if it were possible to pervert them, attempted to be corrupted and perverted by Christian and civilized men, and that in this state, with all incentives to misdemeanor poured around him, and all the temptation to misconduct which the arts and artifices and examples of civilized man can give ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and my brethren in the ministry, from falling into a great mistake. My feelings are always outraged when I hear them speak of "kind masters,"—"Christian masters,"—"the mildest form of slavery,"—"well fed and clothed slaves," as extenuations of slavery; I am satisfied they either mean to pervert the truth, or they do not know what they say. The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... because they preach a different gospel from that preached by Paul, who says: "I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel: which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed," Gal. 1:6-9. "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema, Maran-atha." ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... was, soon 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 ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... 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 alike, compelling ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... died shortly after. He declared that 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 is ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued,—where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow,—the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity: bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... 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 Justice shall ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... curiae, in puffing a court 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 ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... to pervert my meaning! Don't you see that I think your conversation better worth listening to than the most interesting or improving book you can choose from the library? Really, in trying to avoid giving you cause for making such a remark, I have apparently stumbled ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... opinion. When, at the earlier periods alluded to, the doctrine of dependence was dwelt on chiefly, (I do not suppose exclusively,) the public mind believed enough—I might say too much—concerning the free moral agency of man, and had not so well learned as since to pervert the doctrine of dependence to justify the waiting attitude of a passive recipient. And, then, both doctrines told with power on the mind and the conscience, and, through God, were attended with great and happy ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... little girl did not return home, and, search having been instituted, her dismembered body was found strewn about the garden. The clerk was arrested, and in his diary was found this entry, recently made: "Killed a little girl; it was fine and hot." This man was either a sadistic sexual pervert, or a victim of homicidal impulse. Maudsley gives this instance as an example of the latter, while Krafft-Ebing gives it as an example of the former. There is a great difference between these two mental derangements. The victim of homicidal impulse kills without any ulterior object, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... brightens into day.' Thus unprophetic, lately misinspired, I sung: gay fluttering hope my fancy fired: Inly secure, through conscious scorn of ill, Nor taught by wisdom how to balance will, Rashly deceived, I saw no pits to shun, But thought to purpose and to act were one; Heedless what pointed cares pervert his way, Whom caution arms not, and whom woes betray; But now exposed, and shrinking from distress, I fly to shelter while the tempests press; My Muse to grief resigns the varying tone, The raptures languish, and the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... you.—Always deceived in fact by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience.—Fancying you to have fathomed his secret. Natural enough!—his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others.—Mystery; Finesse—how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Negritos, and other peoples. Four convents are established, each of them with several visitas, and the mission to the Mangyans on the bay of Ilog, in the last of which none of the apostatized Christians are allowed to enter lest they pervert the new plants. "But that fine flower-garden [i.e., the island of Mindoro] has been trampled down and even ruined by the Moros." The Dominicans bend their energies to the work in their newly-acquired missions of Zambales. With malicious satisfaction, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... own Romans who come over here and put up their names on old statues of Themistocles and Miltiades. You admire Cicero who, although he loved Athens and wished that he might leave here some gift from himself, scorned to pervert an ancient statue. And yet, I tell you, Cicero was a Roman first, a lover of Greek culture second. All that he learned here he dedicated to the Republic. He studied Isocrates and Demosthenes in order that by his voice he might free Rome from traitors and persuade Justice to 'walk down ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... 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
... interests that must excite them. The hazard of great interests cannot fail to agitate strong passions. We are not disinterested; it is impossible we should be dispassionate. The warmth of such feelings may becloud the judgment, and, for a time, pervert the understanding. But the public sensibility, and our own, has sharpened the spirit of inquiry, and given an animation to the debate. The public attention has been quickened to mark the progress of the discussion, and its judgment, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... it remembered, the mere boasting manifesto of a hot-brained inexperienced youth, entering on literature with feelings of heroic ardour, which its difficulties and temptations would soon deaden or pervert: they are the calm principles of a man, expressed with honest manfulness, at a period when the world could compare them with a long course of conduct. In this just and lofty spirit, Schiller undertook the business of literature; in the same spirit he pursued it with unflinching energy ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... these facts: corruption sways, Self-interest does pervert man's ways; That bribes do blind; that present crimes Do equal those of former times: Can I against plain facts engage To vindicate the present age? I know that bribes in modern palm Can nobler energies encalm; That where such argument exists There itching is in modern fists. And ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... class have it in their power so to mould this change as to render it peaceful, gradual and universally beneficent; or they can turn a deaf ear to the calls of humanity, and let the demagogue, the envious, the selfishly discontented, pervert it into an engine of convulsion, destruction and desolation. As in the days of King John, the barons laid the foundations of English political liberty, so in our day the intellectual and philanthropic may ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... 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 there in ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... upon the law and the evidence to maintain our rights to this property. But the other side have not thus acted; they have not been content that you should weigh only the evidence; they have endeavored to corrupt your minds and pervert your judgments; they have said that you were so low and debased that although you had with uplifted hands declared that so might the ever-living God help you, as you rendered a verdict according to the evidence, ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... familiar with the figure of Sokrates as he went in and out amongst them; they knew his character and his manner of life; and, though the poet ventured to pervert the teaching and to ridicule the habits of a well-known citizen, he would not venture to put before the people a representation in which there was not a grain ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... 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 much of having ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... Son, sitting on his right hand, he pointed out the fallen spirit. "No prescribed bounds can shut our Adversary in; nor can the chains of hell hold him. To our new world he goes, and there, by no fault of mine, will pervert man, whom I have placed therein, with a free will; so to remain until he enthralls himself. Man will fall as did Satan, but as Satan was self-tempted, and man will be deceived by another, the latter shall find grace where his ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... was still defection on the Union side, and among many "plain people" too; for Horace Greeley, the best-known Union editor, lost his nerve and ran away. And Greeley was not the only Union journalist who helped, sometimes unwittingly, to pervert public opinion. The "writing up" of McClellan for what he was not, though rather hysterical, was at least well meant. But the reporters who "wrote down" General Cox, because he would not make them members of his staff in West Virginia, disgraced their profession. The lies about ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth. Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blase view of the world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the songs and essays ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... 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 Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... 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, ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... mercy towards this hell-brood of Satan, for the devil lately had become so powerful everywhere, but especially in dear Pomerania-land, that, if not prevented, he would soon pervert the whole people, and turn them away from the pure and blessed evangelical doctrine. Still he must have them all tried fairly before the sheriff's court ere he tortured or burned. His brother of blessed memory had too long delayed the burning, therefore he must now be ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... word or action on the part of someone whether in jest or earnest, only do 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
... wisdom. It likewise supplies a test for ascertaining the state of the heart. Those who receive it with faith unfeigned will delight to meditate on its wonderful discoveries; but those who are unrenewed in the spirit of their minds will render to it only a doubtful submission, and will pervert its plainest announcements. The apostle therefore says—"There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you." [208:5] The heretic is made manifest alike by his deviations from the doctrines and the precepts of revelation. His creed does not exhibit ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... entirely by avarice and the desire of revenge, now disputed his name and rights, in order the better to deprive him of his property, which might be worth from sixteen to eighteen hundred livres. In order to attain his end, this wicked man had not hesitated to pervert his wife's mind, and at the risk of her own dishonour had instigated this calumnious charge—a horrible and unheard-of thing in the mouth of a lawful wife. "Ah! I do not blame her," he cried; "she must suffer more than I do, if she really entertains doubts such as these; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that Prussian despotism was the natural ally of the Russian Bolshevik and the I.W.W. here. Both exist to pervert and enslave the people; both seek to break down the national spirit of the world for their own wicked ends. Both are doomed to failure. By taking our place in the world, America is to become more American, as by doing his duty the individual ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... 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 ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... dissonance,—an orchestra in which each artist is tuning his instrument, setting it in a different key and to play a different tune: each bird recalls a different tune, and none sings "Annie Laurie,"—to pervert Bayard ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Sidonie had been hoping for that letter, a month during which she had brought all her coaxing and cunning into play to lure her brother-in-law on to that written revelation of passion. She had difficulty in accomplishing it. It was no easy matter to pervert an honest young heart like Frantz's to the point of committing a crime; and in that strange contest, in which the one who really loved fought against his own cause, she had often felt that she was at the end of her strength and was almost discouraged. When she was ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... novelty and humor of her opinions; with her generous encouragement of rising merit of any sort, in all ranks, high or low; with her charities, which know no distinction between abroad and at home; with her large indulgence, which no ingratitude can discourage, and no servility pervert? Everybody has heard of the popular old lady—the childless widow of a long-forgotten lord. Everybody knows ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... and probably terminate with complete 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 seldom be at peace or on friendly terms with ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... divert, convert, invert, pervert, advertize, inadvertent, verse, aversion, adverse, adversity, adversary, version, anniversary, versatile, divers, diversity, conversation, perverse, universe, university, traverse, subversive, divorce; (2) vertebra, vertigo, controvert, revert, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... them, 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 ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... Babylonians under Nabonidus, and all other decadent races threatened by ruin, they attributed their decline, 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, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 And **raise the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... had none—some calculating conspiracy—and he was direct as the day—some base amusement or hidden habit or acrid disease would hold him in captivity and pervert his heart less than this simple aberration of behavior. Had he been a hunchback men would have overlooked it; a hideous goitre or wen they would not have resented; but extreme gentility or high-bred courtesy could not refrain from turning to look ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Rome! O my vext soul, How might I force this to the present state? Are there no players here? no poet apes, That come with basilisk' s eyes, whose forked tongues Are steeped in venom, as their hearts in gall? Either of these would help me; they could wrest, Pervert, and poison all they hear or see, With senseless glosses, and allusions. Now, if you be good devils, fly me not. You know what dear and ample faculties I have endowed you with: I'll lend you more. Here, take my snakes among you, come and eat, And while the squeez'd juice ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... and aguardiente, or rum, made from sugar-cane juice. Both of these are powerful intoxicants. A very valuable and harmless article is thus sacrificed to make a liquid poison. So in our Middle and Western States we pervert both barley and rye from their legitimate purposes, and turn them into ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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 contempt ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... guiltless of pretence, of steels, or tournures. Gathered bodices and full plain skirts, confined by broad sashes, combined the elements of grace and utility, and exhibited no foolish attempt to distort and pervert nature." ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... hypotheses which have been offered in explanation of the religious phenomena of the world may be summed up as follows: The first and second theories we have rejected as utterly false. Instead of being faithful to and adequately explaining the facts, they pervert, and maltreat, and distort the facts of religious history. The last three each contain a precious element of truth which must not be undervalued, and which can not be omitted in an explanation which can be pronounced complete. Each theory, taken by itself, is incomplete ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... his followers say that they take their doctrine of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" from Marx, they pervert the truth; they take from Marx only the phrase, not their fundamental policy. It is not to be denied that there were times when Marx himself momentarily lapsed into the error of Blanqui and the older ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... inhabitants, his slight and flitting thoughts are like passengers that travell to and fro continually; here is also the great Court of justice erected, which is always kept by conscience who is both accuser, excuser, witness, and Judge, whom no bribes can pervert, nor flattery cause to favour, but as he finds the evidence, so he absolves or condemnes: yea, so Absolute is this Court of Judicature, that there is no appeale from it—no, not to the Court of heaven itself—for if our conscience condemn us, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the service of the infidels—it is but yesterday; but I, I, the shepherd of my flock, will not suffer that he who is the highest in rank, the richest in possessions, the most powerful by the mere dignity of his name, shall pervert thousands of the Jacobite brethren. I have the will and the power too, to close the sluice gates against such a disaster. Obey me, or you shall rue it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... congregation in Connecticut was composed of Philistines, as not to believe that the red men were the lost tribes, and that Peter, in particular, was not especially and elaborately described in the Old Testament. He had become so thoroughly possessed by this crotchet as to pervert everything that he saw, read, or heard, into evidence, of some sort or other, of the truth of his notions. In this respect there was nothing peculiar in the good missionary's weakness, it being a failing common to partisans of a theory, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... advocates, it has neither beauty, nor worth, nor credibility. Some teach only a very small portion of Christianity, and the portion they teach they often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated and outlandish dress. The language of many theologians, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... judgments is one of the most important elements of civilisation; it is upon this that the possibility of moral progress on a large scale chiefly depends. Few things pervert men more than the habit of regarding as enviable persons or qualities injurious to Society. The most obvious example is the passionate admiration bestowed on a brilliant conqueror, which is often quite irrespective ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... fine, of heaven and earth reversed; those laws, established by God himself, in demonstration of his magnificence and wisdom; those eternal laws, anterior to all codes, to all the prophets those immutable laws, which neither the passions nor the ignorance of man can pervert. But that passion which mistaketh, that ignorance which observeth neither causes nor effects, hath said in its folly: "All things flow from chance; a blind fatality poureth out good and evil upon the earth; success is not to the prudent, nor felicity to the wise;" ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney |
