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More "Pervert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the virus of disaffection. It can, for instance, intimate that it will cease to 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 refute a ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... at the former that they may conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants may refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body after labor of brain; they do not help it—not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff—or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... are 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 into ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... misinterpretations of its 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 ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the present age a sickly, sentimental humanity which is busily endeavoring to pervert the sense and love of justice in mankind. It regards the disposition to do wrong as a disease, to be treated with appropriate emollients applied over the heart, or some gentle opiate or alterative taken through the ears. It pities ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... quite sound physically. He ate a great deal and was known to take bread away from other prisoners at night. He was sentenced for 15 months for swindling. He himself related that in youth he had seen many monks and had become possessed of the idea of being one. He was a sex pervert. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... its members the necessary instruction and the 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 it ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... for each one of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... them away at watering-places or elsewhere, seeking pleasure instead of doing God service. It is not considered disreputable to take fee after fee to uphold injustice, to plead against innocence, to pervert truth, and to aid the devil. It is not considered disreputable to gamble on the Stock Exchange, or to corrupt the honesty of electors by bribes, for doing which the penalty attached is equal to that decreed to the offence of which I am guilty. All these, and much more, ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... subject, and to show how many persons strive to pervert praiseworthy enterprises, I will instance again the people of St. Malo and others, who say that the profit of these discoveries belongs to them, since Jacques Cartier, who first visited Canada and the islands of New Foundland, was from their city, as if that city had contributed ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... am afraid,' she returned, 'to leave him, I am afraid to leave any of them. When I am gone, they pervert—but they ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... his language has been modernised to a considerable extent. But such is not the fact. The orthography has been altered. Greater attention than formerly has been paid to the punctuation. This was so defective in many places, as completely to obscure and pervert the meaning of the author. The references to scripture have also been corrected in numerous instances. But beyond this, nothing almost whatever has been done, with the exception of the occasional emendation of what, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... too frequent insistence on the doctrine of the forgiveness of sin, the doctrine of compensation and retribution, as taught by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been instilled into our hearts. "Ye shall not go forth until ye have paid the last farthing," is the teaching. Dare to break those solemn laws, to pervert these mysterious powers we possess, Amen, Amen, we cannot escape retribution; we cannot go forth until we pay the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... entirely another affair. He could neither stifle nor deaden that. It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping. But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then? Was it what he had lost—the familiar world—rather than ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... ineligible as appeals on particular occasions as they emerge. If the periods be separated by short intervals, the measures to be reviewed and rectified will have been of recent date, and will be connected with all the circumstances which tend to vitiate and pervert the result of occasional revisions. If the periods be distant from each other, the same remark will be applicable to all recent measures; and in proportion as the remoteness of the others may favor a dispassionate review of them, this advantage is inseparable from inconveniences which seem to ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... 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, averse, versus, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... highly absurd to deny, that this gentleman has manifested very extraordinary powers of language and imagination in his treatment of the allegory, however grossly and miserably he may have tried to pervert its purpose and meaning. But of this more anon. In the meantime, what can be more deserving of reprobation than the course which he is allowing his intellect to take, and that too at the very time when he ought to be laying the foundations of a lasting and honourable name. There is no ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... yet these thoughts were bright upon our souls, There came the rumour that a day was set To hear us. Many of our former friends, Some with entreaties, some with taunts and threats, Came to us to pervert us; with the rest Again Perpetua's father, worn with care; Nor could we choose but pity his distress, So miserably, with abject cries and tears, He fondled her and called her 'Domina,' And bowed his aged body at her ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... certainly was not. We might answer all you say by declaring that the Republican 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 to the present ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... gradually 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 ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... such a profusion of charms and graces, and sent them into the world more 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 ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... anywhere, we are as clay in the hands of the potter. It is the greatest of delusions to suppose that we come into this world as sheets of white paper on which the age can write anything it likes, making us good or bad, noble or mean, as the age pleases. The age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre-existent capacities, but it cannot create them. The worthy Robert Owen, who saw in external circumstances the great moulders of human character, was obliged to supplement his doctrine by making the man himself ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the protestant churches, and the decrees which had been, from time to time, made in favour of the protestants. But the investigation of these things was carried on with the most manifest partiality; old charters were wrested to a wrong sense, and sophistry was used to pervert the meaning of every thing, which tended ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... fully explained and satisfied by the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints and souls in one great society, labouring for a conjoint salvation and beatitude. We Catholics know well enough that the degraded and superstitious will pervert saint-worship as they pervert other good things to their own hurt and to God's dishonour, but we also know that of itself the doctrine of the Heavenly Court is altogether in the interests of the very highest and purest religion. In all this matter, needless to say, Mr. Lang is ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... undemocratic, disloyal. Our nation is a democracy of nationalities having for its aim the equal growth and free development of all. It can take no sides. To require it to take sides, German or Anglo-Saxon, Slavic or Jewish, is to be untrue to its spirit and to pervert its ideal. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... to deliver important opinions; for I do not desire these, but only to pervert the right for my own advantage, and ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... 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 ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... imagined than the conflict between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases. Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... these aspects of Cassio's character are quite compatible. Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just because he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things we trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some doctrine or ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... providing mirth and good cheer for mortals below; and it was time they should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them, whether the Fasts should be admitted. Some said, the appearance of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection was over-ruled by Christmas Day, who had a design upon Ash Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire to see how the old Domine would behave himself in his cups. Only the Vigils were requested to come with their lanterns, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... disclosed his intentions to any one, he appears to have been constantly and assiduously engaged in endeavoring to imbitter the minds of the colored population against the white. He rendered himself perfectly familiar with all those parts of the Scriptures which he thought he could pervert to his purpose, and would readily quote them to prove that slavery was contrary to the laws of God; that slaves were bound to attempt their emancipation, however shocking and bloody might be the consequences; and that such ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 victims ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... 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 his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the reason why your Reflectors would break the glass, which has shewed them their own faces. The business of the theatre is to expose vice and folly; to dissuade men by examples from one, and to shame them out of the other. And however you may pervert our good intentions, it was here particularly to reduce men to loyalty, by shewing the pernicious consequences of rebellion, and popular insurrections. I believe no man, who loves the government, would be glad to see the rabble in such a posture, as they were represented ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... self-respect, efficiency, or character, have worked not for the public good, but on the principle that "to the victors belong the spoils." Their rapacity and greed have led them to sacrifice principle to party. They aim to manage caucuses, pervert elections, override the wishes and defy the moral sense of the people, and corrupt ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... vain speeches of any trouble you, who pervert the truth, that they may draw you aside from the truth of the Gospel ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... 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
... 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 ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... 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 the nave and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 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, and nerve them for exertion in the ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... about the whole thing and protectively pervert the original spelling of "Rabbit" to "Rarebit" in their culinary guides. We have heard that once a club of ladies in high society tried to high-pressure the publishers of Mr. Webster's dictionary to change ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... that porridge regimen, Wilf,' remarked the master 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
... (who is also called Paul), filled with the Holy Spirit, fixed his eyes on him, (10)and said: O full of all deceit and all wickedness, child of the Devil, enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? (11)And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and darkness; and going about, he sought persons to lead ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... are not obscured by what the hands of men have made. The twofold vision ranges free and far. Here are no brick walls, no unnatural need or circumstance, no confusing inventions, no gasping haste, no specious distractions, no clamour of wheel and heartless voices, to blind the soul, to pervert its pure desires, to deaden its fears, to deafen its ears to the sweeter calls—to shut it in, to shrivel it: to sicken it in every part. Rock and waste of sea and the high sweep of the sky—winds and rain and sunlight and flying clouds—great hills, mysterious distances, flaming sunsets, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... 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 develops his own manhood. We see now that when ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... calamities for which he was in no way responsible. Kind-hearted Mrs. Mozeen was just the woman to take a motherly interest in a well-disposed lad like Joseph; and it was equally characteristic of my valet—especially when Rothsay was thoughtless enough to encourage him—to pervert an innocent action for the sake of indulging in a stupid jest. I took advantage of my privilege as an ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... pretending to call themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable policy, of tampering with the truth, investing the real facts in false disguises, to cringe to the prejudices of the many, and to pervert science into a seeming accordance with popular prepossessions." I cannot believe that this will be regarded as justifiable language: it seems scarce worthy of a man of science; and will, I fear, only be accepted as good in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... inclined to forgive. Hast thou not observed those unto whom part of the scriptures was delivered? they sell error, and desire that ye may wander from the right way; but God well knoweth your enemies. God is a sufficient patron, and God is a sufficient helper. Of the Jews there are some who pervert words from their places; and say, We have heard, and have disobeyed; and do thou hear without understanding our meaning, and look upon us: perplexing with their tongues, and reviling the true religion. ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... 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
... 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 destroyed. Likewise, in accordance with tropology (m), we ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... king succeed the present men; the children of foreigners will, for the future, fill the parliament, and the private interest of their patron will guide their venal votes." "What an act of oppression," rejoined the monks, "to pervert to other objects the pious designs of our holy institutions, to contemn the inviolable wishes of the dead, and to take that which a devout charity had deposited in our chests for the relief of the unfortunate and make it subservient to the luxury ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... God giveth thee; and they shall judge the people with just judgment. Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift; for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise and pervert the words of the righteous." To the same purpose Josephus relates, in his account of the last address delivered by Moses to the Hebrew people, that this great legislator gave instructions to appoint seven judges in every city, men who had distinguished themselves by their ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... sitting up,—I could not stand, for my legs were tied, and my arms fixed in a neat pair of steel handcuffs. "I have," said I, "unbelieving dogs! I have. Do you think to pervert a Christian gentleman from his faith and honor? Ruffian blackamoors! do your worst; heap tortures on this body, they cannot last long. Tear me to pieces: after you have torn me into a certain number of pieces, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... especially ver. 30, was approaching, and that thereby every hope of its rising to complete prosperity seemed to be set aside. Since, therefore, the faith in this event rested merely on the word, it was necessary that the word should be as distinct as possible, in order that no one might pervert, or explain it away. Calvin remarks: "He shall rule as a King, i.e., He shall rule gloriously; so that there do not merely appear some relics of former glory, but that He flourish and be powerful as a King, and attain ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... devil; "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, at either place, ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... 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
... 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 ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... 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 ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... is a good and just man, I do believe, and has, beside, no imaginable motive to pervert either his conscience or his judgment. He's not gone to tempt him—stuff!—but to unfold the facts and invite his consideration; and I say, considering how thoughtlessly such duties are often undertaken, and how long Silas ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... absolute and specific 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 would have rested with his chief. ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... 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 ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... say with truth, that such a character has never fallen under his observation: much less would he be thought to reflect on the Artists, as a class of men to which such baseness may be generally imputed. The case here is merely supposed, to shew how easily imbecility and selfishness may pervert this most innocent of all arts to the vilest purposes. He may be allowed also to disclaim an opinion too generally prevalent; namely, that envy and detraction are the natural offspring of the art. That Artists should possess a portion of these vices, in common ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... on whom they have cast their eyes for the choice of two alcaldes. This year, while separated into factions, the regidors—finding one of them favored by an auditor who was trying for his own private ends to oust an alcalde in opposition to the community—tried to pervert the said custom of sending me the nomination. I did not allow that, because of the innovation and because of the difficulty involved therein that, in a presidio that is open to so many enemies, alcaldes ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... who gave shelter to the false prophet, Rakkeed, when he was here; of the faithless priests who gave ear to his abominable heresies and allowed him to spew out his blasphemies in the temples; of those who sent spies to Krink, to corrupt and pervert my soldiers and nobles; ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... examine all that is offered to our belief, and test it by the faculties with which the great God has endowed us. These rare senses and powers of reasoning were given to be used freely, but not audaciously, to discover, not to pervert the truth. Why were so many things presented as through a veil, unless to stimulate our efforts to clear away the veil, and penetrate to the light? I think it is plain that St. Paul, while he calls upon us to believe, never intended that ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... 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 against all kinds of inconclusive evidence which can be mistaken ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... unworthy itself, all belief in the actions of God or of unseen spirits, the angels, heaven, but will not dare to doubt the existence of moving atoms, invisible corpuscles. This is the mental poverty into which the enemies of religious faith unwittingly fall. They pervert that instrument of reason whose true use is to supplement and fortify imperfect intelligence, and misuse it to discredit and overthrow the original ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the right to pervert language, fixing new meanings to words in common use which are in direct opposition to established usage? The man who knows the meaning of a word and uses it in a contrary sense is guilty of an abuse of language; and if he fails to make known the fact that he is using the term in ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... religion, 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 one ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... all the States to revise the Constitution, and that the Administration abandon the narrow platform of the Chicago convention, expel corrupt men from office, and exclude advocates of abolition from the Cabinet, declaring that it would "regard any attempt to pervert the conflict into a war for the emancipation of slaves as fatal to the hope of restoring ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... those readers who are not disgusted by such ineptitudes, perplex weak minds, and pervert vain ones. Of such discussions it may be said with the son of Sirach, that "when a man hath done, then he beginneth; and when he leaveth off, then he shall ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... endued with popular talents, of figure and fortune in the world, and without the advantages of apparent disinterestedness on their side, will allways have address enough, with a seeming plausibility, to pervert every act of Government at home, and to defame and run down every publick transaction abroad; and disciples will never be wanting of capacity and passions fitted to become the dupes of such false apostles. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... breath. I am going to put every faculty I own on to making 'The Opp Eagle' a fine paper. I expect to get here at seven o'clock A.M., and continue to pursue my work as far into the midnight hours as may need be. Nothing in the way of pleasure or anything else is going to pervert my attention. Of course you understand that my mind will be taken up with the larger issues of things, and I'll have to risk a dependence on you to attend to ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... 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 Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... trade, and the enacting by Congress of a Territorial slave code. We must 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 Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... jealousy would still have done its worst in besmirching. It was not, if the Rabelaisian trend in so much of Jacobean writing be any indication, a particularly moral age. Few ages in history are. It was not, with a reputed pervert as the fount of honour, a particularly moral Court. Since the emergence of the lovely young Countess from tutelage at Audley End there had been no lack of suitors for her favour. And when Frances so openly exhibited her preference for the King's minion there would be some among ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of 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 ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... and leaves none for the commission of great misdeeds. As hunters it is divided between the toil of the chase, the idleness of repose, or the indulgence of inebriation. Hunting is but a licentious idle life, and if it does not always pervert good dispositions; yet, when it is united with bad luck, it leads to want: want stimulates that propensity to rapacity and injustice, too natural to needy men, which is the fatal gradation. After this explanation of the effects which follow by living in the woods, shall we yet vainly flatter ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... 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 ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... this feeling of the soul's sensitiveness, the thoughtful man is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of little moment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye of the soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, in consequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spurious consecration, or the world in its blindness may have come to honour them, they are in fact laden with mischief to the ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... 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 three witnesses to their wills? Those ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... 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 And **raise the man in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... enlightened book-mongers their 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 wedded to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... for we 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 remains no ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... disreputable to take tithes, intended for the service of God, and lavish them away at watering-places or elsewhere, seeking pleasure instead of doing God service. It is not considered disreputable to take fee after fee to uphold injustice, to plead against innocence, to pervert truth, and to aid the devil. It is not considered disreputable to gamble on the Stock Exchange, or to corrupt the honesty of electors by bribes, for doing which the penalty attached is equal to that decreed to the offence of which I am guilty. All these, ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 the truth even of ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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 ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... injustice and harm. Over that book, if it be a prettily written tale, many young ladies will weep: and though without the faintest intention of imitating your hero's behaviour, they will think that it would be a fine thing if they did so. And it is a great mischief to pervert the moral judgment and falsely to excite the moral feelings. You forget that wrong is wrong, though it be done against yourself, and that you have no right to acquit the wrong to yourself as though it were no wrong at all. That lies beyond your province. You may forgive the personal offence, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... been created before Adam, but the Holy One—blessed be He!—said, "Should he pervert things as I make them, then there will be no one to rectify them; so behold I will create Adam first, and if he should make things crooked, then Abraham following him will make ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the lawyer accurately expressed the conviction in my mind. The narrative related by Ambrose had all the appearance, in my eyes, of a fabricated story, got up, and clumsily got up, to pervert the plain meaning of the circumstantial evidence produced by the prosecution. I reached this conclusion reluctantly and regretfully, for Naomi's sake. I said all I could say to shake the absolute confidence which she ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... 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 welfare of ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... lost the principle of its animation becomes dust. Hence it is an axiom that the change or perversion of the principles by which anything was produced, is the destruction of that very thing; if you can change or pervert the principles from which anything springs, you destroy it. For instance, one single foreign element introduced into the blood produces death; one false assumption admitted into science, destroys its certainty; one false principle admitted into ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... acclaim of every group or authority in the State again swell the one great, constant, triumphant adulatory hymn which, with its insistence, unanimity and violent sonorities, tends to bewilder all minds, deaden consciences and pervert the judgment. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... sound of many voices in the street commanding silence. Then followed a louder voice. It was a herald's proclamation. Listening attentively, I recognized the words of the Resolution of the Council, enjoining the arrest, imprisonment, or execution of any one who should pervert the minds of the people by delusions, and by professing to have received revelations ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... you 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
... is the cause of this corruption? It is, says the theologian, because the 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 alone is ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... 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
... 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 contempt ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... however, was entirely another affair. He could neither stifle nor deaden that. It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping. But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then? Was it what he had lost—the familiar world—rather than what ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... 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, the poet's ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... they are in reality serving him. "Therefore," he continues, consciously following an argument of St. Cyprianus against the pagan miracles, "these wicked spirits do lurk in shrines, in roods, in crosses, in images: and first of all pervert the priests, which are easiest to be caught with bait of a little gain. Then work they miracles. They appear to men in divers shapes; disquiet them when they are awake; trouble them in their sleeps; distort their members; take away their ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... 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, averse, versus, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... that "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 the first ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... this page for the exact word, my eye is caught by one of the sentences of Londonian[4] thought which constantly pervert the well-meant books of pious England. "We see also," says the Dean, "the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which marks so many of the legends both of Pagan and Christian times." I might simply reply to this insinuation that ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... and 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 school of Utopian, conspiratory ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... skilful geometrician, who when more easily, and with one 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 ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, And rulers of the house of Israel, That abhor justice and pervert all equity; That 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, ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... he asked again; "or, 'Lays of the Apostles'? or, 'The English Church older than the Roman'? or, 'Anglicanism of the Early Martyrs'? or, 'Confessions of a Pervert'? or, 'Eustace Beville'? or, ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... 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
... 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 ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Iupiter lapis, when you know that Iupiter cannot be angry with anyone?[702] What is to become of the people of Ulubrae,[703] if you have decided that it is not right to take part in civic business? Wherefore, if you are really and truly a pervert from our faith, I am much annoyed; but if you merely find it convenient to humour Pansa, I forgive you. Only do write and tell us how you are, and what you want me to do or to ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... it very absurd. Common custom is the standard of propriety in language. And for any man to affect speaking improperly is to pervert the use of speech, and can never serve to a better purpose than to protract and multiply disputes, where there ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... home to her parents this very night,' declared Aunt Margarine; 'she shall not stay here to pervert our happy household with ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... speak these things? And the words of your mouth be like a mighty wind? Doth God pervert justice? Or ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... 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, while the ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... head in a royal Ball, And saw all the Haram so hoary; And who there besides but Corinna de Stal![48] Turned Methodist and Tory! "Aye—Aye"—quoth he—"'t is the way with them all, When Wits grow tired of Glory: But thanks to the weakness, that thus could pervert her, Since the dearest of prizes to me's a deserter: 200 Mem—whenever a sudden conversion I want, To send to the school of Philosopher Kant; And whenever I need a critic who can gloss over All faults—to send for Mackintosh to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature which must be taken literally. These are the discussions of the Halaka (the legal and ceremonial portions). To pervert these from their literal meaning, or to maintain that the intention of the law is the important thing and not the practice of the ceremony, is heresy and infidelity; though it is meritorious to seek for an explanation of every law, as the Rabbis ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... paid attorneys arguing the cause before the court must be arguing for the unjust side and in favor of wrong. Hence, it is claimed, the system of paid advocacy must in every case tend to an effort on one side or the other to pervert justice and mislead the judges into inequity ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... deeds. Many contributed 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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 ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... cries shame upon us that their voice has been so long 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 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
... 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 true ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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, and nerve them for ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Are not you the cause of it? what had you to bate in your Pursuit of Maria to pervert Lady Teazle by the way.—had you not a sufficient field for your Roguery in blinding Sir Peter and supplanting your Brother—I hate such an avarice of crimes—'tis an ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... house to be scattered with profane and wicked 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 putting forth themselves ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... 'go between' Desdemona and himself. It is fortunately a fact in human nature that these aspects of Cassio's character are quite compatible. Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just because he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things we trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some doctrine or purpose ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... to the soul, yet it must be remembered that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: I own that I can perceive in Nature ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... whose very existence as such is professedly to cultivate and disseminate the principles of sound morality and true religion, does fall so far short of the faith delivered to the saints—does so far forget its origin, and pervert its aims, as to violate common law and common honesty, and persist in its violation, deliberately, against repeated remonstrances, by sheer force? Yet we see no convulsion in the community. Nothing intimates that a great ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or did not, pervert the ballad, and turn a false Elliot into a false Scott version, cannot be obtained unless new documents bearing on the matter ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... It ought to be an invariable rule with all who have the care of children, to give them food only when it is needful. Instead of observing this simple and obvious rule, it is too common, throughout every period of childhood, to pervert the use of food by giving it when it is not wanted, and consequently when it does mischief, not only in a physical but in a moral point of view. To give food as an indulgence, or in a way of reward, or to withhold ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... according to reason, nor would anything appear to be his own doing. It would be the same if he foreknew events. ii. If man saw divine providence plainly, he would inject himself into the order and tenor of its course, and pervert and destroy them. iii. If man beheld divine providence plainly he would either deny God or make himself god. iv. Man can see divine providence on the back and not in the face; also in a spiritual, not a ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... 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' weakness ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... has its own religion, a lay religion. If I possess any other it is through its condescension and under restrictions. It is, by nature, hostile to other associations than its own; they are rivals, they annoy it, they absorb the will and pervert the votes of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not conscious that, when we opened this book, we were under the influence of any feeling likely to pervert our judgment. Undoubtedly we had long entertained a most unfavorable opinion of Barere; but to this opinion we were not tied by any passion or by any interest. Our dislike was a reasonable dislike, and might have been removed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the literature about 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 ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... 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, at either ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... for they don't swear, he comes sometimes in lawn sleeves, and looks like a bishop, which is popery, or in the garb of high churchmen, who are all Jesuits. Is it any wonder these cantin' fellows pervert the understanding, sap the principles, corrupt the heart, and destroy the happiness of so many? Poor dear old Minister used to say, 'Sam, you must instruct your conscience; for an ignorant or superstitious ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... closely connected grammatically with the immediately preceding words or phrases, that they should be read without a perceptible pause, or with only a slight one for breath, without change of voice. Some of the commas would grossly pervert the meaning if strictly construed. Thus, from No. 3 it would appear that the people of the United States in general lived adjacent to the frontier; from No. 4, that all observers have recently investigated the point in question; from No. 6, that all the cabin passengers were so situated ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Leo, &c., are so clearly described with two tier of oars, that I must censure the version of Meursius and Fabricius, who pervert the sense by a blind attachment to the classic appellation of Triremes. The Byzantine historians are sometimes guilty of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... of the room from Mr. Durham to the provost, craving his assistance to apprehend Mr. Durham as a Jesuit, assuring the provost, that if ever there was a jesuit in Rome he was one, and that if he were suffered to remain in the town or country, he might pervert many from the faith.——Upon which the provost, going along with him to the house where the pretended jesuit was, and entering the room, he immediately knew Mr. Durham, and saluted him as laird of Easter Powrie, craving his pardon for their ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... true devotion, and that ignorance and neglect on the part of the clergy, has introduced to that ceremony,—nevertheless it is not so; the clergy themselves appear to co-operate in those attempts to pervert the ideas of the nation. The proof of it is, that being ordered by all the councils, especially that of Trent, to preach a sermon, during the high mass, explaining the gospel for the day, as is done in all other Roman Catholic countries, yet in Spain no such practice is ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... of Italy to the other, nothing is listened to in the way of music but Rossini and his imitators. The man must have a transcendant genius, who can lead and pervert the taste of his age as Rossini has done; but unfortunately those who have not his talent, who cannot reach his beauties nor emulate his airy brilliance of imagination, think to imitate his ornamented style by merely crowding note upon note, semi-quavers, demi-semi-quavers, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... acknowledged, "I always adopt a little pleonasm myself to avoid Christian controversy, and say 'when So-and-so became' a Roman or Anglican Catholic, a Protestant, Positivist, or whatever else it might be; and I let them say 'convert' or 'pervert,' whichever they like, to me, because I know that it really cannot matter, so long as they are agreeable—not that anybody ever expects them to be, poor little people! although they know quite well that they should never let their ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... vital phenomena are accompanied by, and dependent on, molecular or atomic changes; and whatever retards these retards the phenomena of life; whatever suspends these suspends life. Hence, to say that an agent which retards tissue metamorphosis is in any sense a food, is simply to pervert and ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... hearsay of old standing, such errors are scarcely to be wondered at, particularly when they are found to correspond with the partialities and prejudices of the narrator. These, strengthening as we grow older, gradually pervert or at least alter, the accuracy of our recollections, until they assimilate them to our ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... lead it. And it will cost but little to put in the crossing and take a chance. Remember, Bryce, once we have that crossing in, it stands like a spite-fence between Pennington and the law which he knows so well how to pervert to suit his ignoble purposes." He turned earnestly to Bryce and waved a trembling admonitory finger. "Your job is to keep out of court. Once Pennington gets the law on us, the issue will not be settled in our ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... countless young 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 waste their time and exhaust their strength in foolish and futile ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... down an axiom in literary criticism:—"A mere literary attack, however well or ill-founded, would not easily have drawn me into a public expostulation; for every man's true literary character is best seen in his own writings. Critics may rail, disguise, insinuate, or pervert; yet still the object of their censures lies equally open to all the world. Thus the world becomes a competent judge of the merits of the work animadverted on. Hence, the mere author hath a fair chance for a fair decision, at least among the judicious; and it is of no mighty consequence ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... passion, energy, colour, and vast prodigality of ineffaceable pictures place it undoubtedly at the head of all the pictorial histories of modern times. And the dramatic rapidity of its action, and the inexhaustible contrasts of its scenes and tableaux—things which so fatally pervert its truthfulness as authentic history—immensely heighten the effect of the poem on the reader's mind. Not that Carlyle was capable of deliberately manufacturing an historical romance in the mendacious way of Thiers and Lamartine. But, having ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... from the faith. 9. Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, 10. And said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? 11. And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand. 12. Then ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... and experience they appear to have, they are stationed; and if they grumble at the duty assigned them, they are called mutinous rascals, and threatened with the cat; the warrant officers are charged to watch them closely, lest they should attempt to pervert the crew, and to prevent them from sending letters from the ship to their friends. Should any letters be detected on them, the sailors are charged, on pain of the severest punishment, to deliver them to some of the ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... people." "Your majesty is greatly mistaken," replied the chancellor; "the nation in general must esteem themselves most happy under your reign; but it will always happen that ill-disposed persons seek to pervert the public opinion, and to lead men's minds astray. The duchess, when travelling, was the faithful and active agent of her brother. The duke, to secure his stay in the ministry, will eagerly avail himself of every adventitious aid; within your kingdom he ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... men have made. The twofold vision ranges free and far. Here are no brick walls, no unnatural need or circumstance, no confusing inventions, no gasping haste, no specious distractions, no clamour of wheel and heartless voices, to blind the soul, to pervert its pure desires, to deaden its fears, to deafen its ears to the sweeter calls—to shut it in, to shrivel it: to sicken it in every part. Rock and waste of sea and the high sweep of the sky—winds ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... disgrace, 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 ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... reflect 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 ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... significations, when applied to faith, and that seldom, are laudable; but when they are drawn from the life and conversation, they are dangerous, and, when men make too many of them, pervert the doctrine of faith. Allegories are fine ornaments, but ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... leaders are the next in guilt; with these the incentive is principally ambition, which, by degrees, became mis-shaped into a specious patriotism. It is known how an ardently desired object pursued for a long period is apt to so monopolize and infatuate the mind as to totally vitiate and pervert the sense of discernment between right and wrong, both as to the legitimacy of the object and the means to be employed for its attainment. As the realization remains deferred and the efforts are increased, the object ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... upon Dick with uplifted sword, "ye would pervert my followers and terrify them into deserting me!" And he aimed a mighty blow at Dick as the pair rushed at each other. But Dick, anticipating something of the sort, had already dropped the bridle upon his charger's neck, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... ought obviously to be an intimate correspondence. Of no law, however excellent, could the benefits be extended, were individuals either ignorant of its nature or opposed to its precepts engaged in its administration. While an irreligious or immoral governor would pervert the course of justice in the administration of laws truly excellent, he would be utterly incompetent to the improvement of those that might be defective. The acts of the best of civil governments—even those founded upon the statutes of Divine truth—from the very nature of ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... 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 ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... crown from the administration, and to divide the latter within itself. To this cabal it was owing that British policy was brought into derision in those foreign countries which, a while ago, trembled at the power of England's arms. Above all, they tried to pervert the principles of Parliament by raising divisions among the people, by influencing the elections, by separating representatives from their constituents, and by undermining the control of the legislature over the executive. They maintained that all political connections were in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... and I feel that our platter is pretty near clean of some things, and we calculate to keep it clean from this time henceforth and forever .... And if men and women will not live their religion, but take a course to pervert the hearts of the righteous, we will 'lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet,' and we will let you know that the earth can swallow you up as did Koran with his hosts; and, as Brother Taylor says, you may dig your graves, and we will slay ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... be lamented, that mothers who are inclined to piety, should pervert even the means of salvation to their destruction—commit the greatest irregularities while apparently pursuing that which should produce the most regular and ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... here to pervert the exhortation of Karl Marx, and unite under the banner of envy and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... and weepeth full bitterly, and curseth thee full heartily for the venomous teaching which thou hast shewed to him, counselling him to do thereafter. And for thy false counselling of many others and him, thou hast great cause to be right sorry! For, long time, thou hast busied thee to pervert whomsoever thou mightest! Therefore as many deaths thou art worthy of, as thou hast given evil counsels. And therefore, by Jesu! thou shalt go thither where NICHOLAS HEREFORD and JOHN PURVEY were harboured! and I undertake, ere this day eight days, thou shalt ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... wilt thou utter these things, And shall the words of thy mouth be like a storm wind? Doth God pervert judgment? Or doth ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... indeed, of these arts of chicanery, was the great secret of the king's administration. While he depressed the nobility, he exalted, and honored, and caressed the lawyers; and by that means both bestowed authority on the laws, and was enabled, whenever he pleased, to pervert them to his own advantage. His government was oppressive; but it was so much the less burdensome, as, by his extending royal authority, and curbing the nobles, he became in reality the sole oppressor ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... often calmed her husband, when he came to search for the child; which for some time he was wont to do, as her retiredness did not please him, and he feared that, in the end, it might make her silly, or even pervert her understanding. The mother often glided to the chink; and almost always found the bright Elf beside her child, employed in sport, or in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... pained," said the minister gravely. "I knew not that my brother had been a pervert from ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... 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
... knows! for you have not prepared yourself for sleep by 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 gods, ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... loss to the Havre Company has ever been so great as that of its late President, Mr. Mortimer Livingston. An honorable and just man in his dealings, both with individuals and the Government, he eschewed every attempt by which some sought to pervert and deprave the legislation of the country, and presented all of his views in steamshipping on high, honorable, and tenable grounds. He pursued the profession in an enlarged spirit of enterprise, and was not ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... porridge regimen, Wilf,' remarked the master 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
... and animals 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 sugar-coated natural history to the real ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... pervert the intent Of a courtesy gentle and rare, Or observance so civilly meant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... not change these foolish sentiments? Would you pervert us? Will you not convert yourself? Lords! you perceive now very clearly what an obstinate fellow this is! Therefore let him be stripped and put into a great caldron of boiling oil. Let him ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 sectional discrimination against ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... those in modern scores are rather more difficult, it is true; but, with very few exceptions, there is nothing in them impossible of execution; composers, masters of their art, write them with care, and as they ought to be executed. If it is from idleness that the simplifiers pervert them, the energetic orchestral conductor is armed with the necessary authority to compel the fulfilment of their duty. If it is from incapacity, let him dismiss them. It is his best interest to rid himself of instrumentalists who cannot play ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... conversion of currency, exchange of currency; exchange rate; bureau de change. chemistry, alchemy; progress, growth, lapse, flux. passage; transit, transition; transmigration, shifting &c v.; phase; conjugation; convertibility. crucible, alembic, caldron, retort. convert, pervert, renegade, apostate. V. be converted into; become, get, wax; come to, turn to, turn into, evolve into, develop into; turn out, lapse, shift; run into, fall into, pass into, slide into, glide into, grow into, ripen into, open into, resolve itself ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... she returned, 'to leave him, I am afraid to leave any of them. When I am gone, they pervert—but they don't mean ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... sense of religion, father? Is there no future life? Is there no God—no judgment? Father, in asking me to abet your falsehood, and sustain you in your deceit, you transgress the limits of parental authority, and the first principles of natural affection. You pervert them, you abuse them; and, I must say, once and for all, that be the weight of your vengeance what it may, I prefer bearing it to enduring the ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... plain reason, that they deliberately pervert the truth. Clap-trap, you innocent creature, to catch foolish readers! When do these consistently good people appear in the life around us, the life that we all see? Never! Are the best mortals that ever ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... such a character has never fallen under his observation: much less would he be thought to reflect on the Artists, as a class of men to which such baseness may be generally imputed. The case here is merely supposed, to shew how easily imbecility and selfishness may pervert this most innocent of all arts to the vilest purposes. He may be allowed also to disclaim an opinion too generally prevalent; namely, that envy and detraction are the natural offspring of the art. That Artists should possess a portion of these vices, in common ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... of evidence to prove that the perception of matter is a modification of the human mind, or that the human mind is its proper and exclusive abode: and all our belief sets in towards the opposite conclusion. Our primitive conviction, when we do nothing to pervert it, is that the perception of matter is not, either wholly, or in part, a condition of the human soul; is not bounded in any direction by the narrow limits of our intellectual span, but that it "dwells ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... for it, to be selfishly engrossed in it, but not mean to enjoy it when it comes, or even to seek it, if we neglect no higher interest in doing so. All that God made us to feel is dignified and pure, unless we pervert it." ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... benefaction is written in brass, the good man's successors have found enough of the same metal to pervert it; for it is now lost, and no person can give any account of it. It needs not brass to outlive honesty; a mere breath will often destroy her. There are, however, several substantial charities belonging to Lavenham, the disposal of which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... would pervert the gospel of Christ. To paraphrase this sentence: "These false apostles do not merely trouble you, they abolish Christ's Gospel. They act as if they were the only true Gospel-preachers. For all that they muddle Law and ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... of its members the necessary instruction and the 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 it just ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... Satan' is applied in the text, and of this I venture to say that it is altogether inapplicable to Marcion. No doubt Marcion, like every other heretical teacher of the second century, or indeed of any century, did 'pervert the oracles of the Lord' by his tortuous interpretations; but he did not pervert them 'to his own lusts.' The high moral character of Marcion was unimpeachable, and is recognized by the orthodox writers of the second ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... 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
... 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 results. But the prominence given to the doctrine of dependence, in preaching, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... be highly absurd to deny, that this gentleman has manifested very extraordinary powers of language and imagination in his treatment of the allegory, however grossly and miserably he may have tried to pervert its purpose and meaning. But of this more anon. In the meantime, what can be more deserving of reprobation than the course which he is allowing his intellect to take, and that too at the very time when he ought to be laying the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 permission to enjoy, and ignores the ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... talk to you about that, Marshal," said Queen Selina. "There are many reasons why it is undesirable that Miss Heritage should remain here any longer. After the underhand and ungrateful manner in which she has tried to pervert Prince Mirliflor from his attachment to Princess Edna, I feel it my ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... 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. ...
— 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
... popular approval unequaled by any other athletic sport. While the game has advanced with marvelous rapidity it has experienced short periods of depression and stagnation during its career of thirty years. It has had enemies who have sought to pervert it for their own uses. It has been all but torn asunder by civil war. But each time it has bravely met the issue and in the end triumphed. It is just now recovering from the effects of a civil war ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... Christ dependeth not upon councils, nor, as St. Paul saith, upon mortal creature's judgment. And if they which ought to be careful for God's Church will not be wise, but slack their duty, and harden their hearts against God and His Christ, going on still to pervert the right ways of the Lord, God will stir up the very stones, and make children and babes cunning, whereby there may ever be some to confute these men's lies. For God is able (not only without councils), ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... than the verdict of a juryman. It is strictly a matter of duty; he is bound to give it according to his best and most conscientious opinion of the public good. Whoever has any other idea of it is unfit to have the suffrage; its effect on him is to pervert, not to elevate his mind. Instead of opening his heart to an exalted patriotism and the obligation of public duty, it awakens and nourishes in him the disposition to use a public function for his own interest, pleasure, ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... 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 Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... that! Elymas the sorcerer withstood him: how did our friend Paul treat him? He said, "Oh, full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of the righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?" That is about the politeness such men ought to have who deny God's truth. "We start with this assumption: we will prove that the Bible is God's word, but we are not going to prove God's word. If you do not like to believe ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... the astonished Mandarin, looking around the room as though to discover in what crevice the unheard-of attributes were hidden. "This person's weaknesses? Can the sounding properties of this ill-constructed roof thus pervert one word into the semblance of another? If not, the bounds set to the admissible from the taker-down of the spoken word, Ming-shu, do not in their most elastic moods extend to calumny and distortion. . . . The one before you has no weaknesses. . . . Doubtless before another ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... lied or boasted. The same the English do in relation to themselves, and to Americans. Above all, in this Trent affair, or excitement, all European writers for the press, professors, doctors, etc., pervert facts, reason, and international laws, forget the past, and lie or flatter, with a slight exception, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... the motherless child of a player, he shook his wise head knowingly and declared, "Truly Satan is kind to his own." He made the player a subject for his next Lord's day sermon, in which he sought to pervert the scriptures to suit his prejudices. The subject of witchcraft was beginning to excite some attention, and he managed in almost every sermon to ring in enough of it to keep up the agitation. In the course of his discourse, ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... 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; whiskey, to cast you into the gutter, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... declares that life, as it appears on the printed page here, is fundamentally sentimentalized, he goes much deeper than "mushiness" with his charge. He means, I think, that there is an alarming tendency in American fiction to dodge the facts of life— or to pervert them. He means that in most popular books only red- blooded, optimistic people are welcome. He means that material success, physical soundness, and the gratification of the emotions have the right of way. He means that men and women (except the comic figures) shall be presented, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... 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 hovering over him—that ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... replied Mistress Nutter; "and proceeds to use all those sophistical arguments, which we have so often heard, to pervert her mind, and overthrow her principles. But Alizon is proof against them all. Religion and virtue support her, and make her more than a match for her opponent. Equally vain are the spirit's attempts to seduce her by the offer ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... suppose I should give them? I look upon them, I repeat it as President or citizen, as being as much opposed to the fundamental principles of this Government, and believe they are as much laboring to pervert or destroy them, as were the men who fought against them in the Rebellion. (A voice: 'Give us the names.') I say Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. (Tremendous applause.) I say Charles Sumner. (Tremendous applause.) I say Wendell Phillips and others of the same stripe are among them. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... run. 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
... convention of all the States to revise the Constitution, and that the Administration abandon the narrow platform of the Chicago convention, expel corrupt men from office, and exclude advocates of abolition from the Cabinet, declaring that it would "regard any attempt to pervert the conflict into a war for the emancipation of slaves as fatal to the hope ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Catholic Parsonage'?" he asked again; "or, 'Lays of the Apostles'? or, 'The English Church older than the Roman'? or, 'Anglicanism of the Early Martyrs'? or, 'Confessions of a Pervert'? or, 'Eustace Beville'? ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... 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
... should I do? Rome! 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 ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... imperfection however slight, or disappointment however transitory has leave to touch. She seemed to have formed his mind of that excellence which no dross can tarnish, and his understanding was such that no error could pervert. His genius was transcendant, and when it rose as a bright star in the east all eyes were turned towards it in admiration. He was a Poet. That name has so often been degraded that it will not convey the idea of all that he was. He was like a poet ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... Institutes, and the Code, the 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, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... his action, however, may unconsciously develop into a throw. There would be no pleasure in argument, cricket, or any other sport if we knowingly cheated. Thus it is always unconsciously that adversaries pervert, garble, and misrepresent each other's opinions; unconsciously, not 'audaciously.' If people would start from the major premise that misrepresentations, if such exist, are unconscious errors, much ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... 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 against ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... his 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
... has power to order it.' He commends confession, when a man humbles himself and, receives forgiveness of God through the lips of a Christian brother, but he denounces any compulsion in the matter, and warns men against priests who pervert it into a means of increasing their own power. He now expressed his public thanks to Sickingen, and dedicated the book to him—'To the just and firm Francis von Sickingen, my especial lord and patron.' In this dedication he repeats the ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... 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, in his triumphant recognition that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... mystify those readers who are not disgusted by such ineptitudes, perplex weak minds, and pervert vain ones. Of such discussions it may be said with the son of Sirach, that "when a man hath done, then he beginneth; and when he leaveth off, then ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... mean pervert. It would be a pity if he did. It wouldn't last, but it would give us a lot of trouble. We are very good Churchmen here. The vicar, and my son too when he's at home, set beautiful examples. My son is going into the Church himself. It has been his dearest wish from a child. He thinks of nothing else—of ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... show how many persons strive to pervert praiseworthy enterprises, I will instance again the people of St. Malo and others, who say that the profit of these discoveries belongs to them, since Jacques Cartier, who first visited Canada and the islands of New Foundland, was from their ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... went about disguiss'd in every Shape. One imitates the Zealous Pharisee, The Essens this, the dammee Sadduce he; And such their ready, and their subtil Wit, For every Trade, and every Science fit: They Credit got, and stole into the Heart, And from their God, did many Souls pervert, Who seeming Jews, or what they were before, In Secret did the Idol Baal adore; Whole false Religion was but loose, and few Could bear the ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... charity. They have their hands full with repressing crime. It is the mixing of the two that confuses standards and makes trouble without end for those who receive the "charity," and even more for those who dispense it. You cannot pervert the first and finest of human instincts without corrupting men: witness my sergeant in Church Street and his ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... strength and permanence. That he has not made use of his power to stifle the expression of thought is clear from the numerous works that have been published, some of which were written for the purpose of attacking his dynasty,—authors of eminence choosing to pervert history by converting its volumes into huge partisan pamphlets, in which the subject handled and the object aimed at are alike libelled. He has kept the press, meaning the journals, more sharply reined up than Englishmen and Americans have approved or can approve; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... three people will agree? And how shall the most sanguine moralist hope to benefit mankind when he finds that, by the multitude, his wisest endeavours to instruct are often considered but as instruments to pervert?" ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wandering as they did the most part of their lives through woods and wilds and 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
... him still alive, but he 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 ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... Counsels, and the dark Dispensations of his Providence: They do but darken Counsel by Words without Knowledge when they undertake it: If we are not able to see how this or that can stand with the Righteousness of him that governs the World, shall we say that the Almighty will pervert Judgment? or that he that governs the Earth hateth Right? Shall we condemn him that is most just? But whereas 'tis objected; where is Providence? And how shall Men live on the Earth, if the Devil may be permitted to use such Power? I demand, where was Providence, when Satan had ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... 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 ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... wealthy 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 guide the car of progress, and ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Rover became gradually 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 that many deemed wild and improbable. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... exhibiting extreme brutality. In the majority of these cases, he says, the offenders are curable under a proper system of treatment, and it is seldom that they again offend. He goes on to say: "The real sexual pervert, however, who is continually tampering with young children is different, as is also the case when young boys are the victims. The worst pervert of all is the one who flagrantly offers himself for the purposes of sodomy. Strange as it may seem, there are quite a number ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... in view, 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... when more easily, and with one 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 ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... nothing;" and the famous author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, has quaintly but nervously observed, "As a lamp is choked with over much oil, or a fire with too much wood, so is the natural heat strangled in the body by the superfluous use of flesh; thus men wilfully pervert the good temperature of their bodies, stifle their wits, strangle nature, and degenerate into beasts." The somewhat visionary but fascinating Rousseau, has also in his Treatise of Education, to which we refer our readers, most powerfully ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... Isab. You pervert my meaning: I would not keep my actions from his knowledge; your bold attempts I would: But yet henceforth conceal your impious flames; I shall not ever be thus indulgent to your shame, to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... signal injustice and harm. Over that book, if it be a prettily written tale, many young ladies will weep: and though without the faintest intention of imitating your hero's behaviour, they will think that it would be a fine thing if they did so. And it is a great mischief to pervert the moral judgment and falsely to excite the moral feelings. You forget that wrong is wrong, though it be done against yourself, and that you have no right to acquit the wrong to yourself as though it were no wrong at all. That lies beyond your province. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... innocently delivered. But to such, where'er they sit concealed, let them know, the author defies them and their writing-tables; and hopes no sound or safe judgment will infect itself with their contagious comments, who, indeed, come here only to pervert and poison the sense of what they hear, and for ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... separated himself from his girl;—but still he thought that he might perhaps best in this way bring about a result which would be so manifestly for her advantage. It might be that the books of poetry and the modes of thought which his wife described as "Ushanting" were of a nature to pervert his girl's mind from the material necessities of life and that a little hardship would bring her round to a more rational condition. With a very heavy heart he consented to do his part,—which was to consist mainly of silence. Any words which ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... land sales at Fort Leavenworth, Judge Lecompte a second time set this wretch at liberty. Mr. Geary was provoked beyond endurance, and wrote to the President that he would not remain in office and allow such a scoundrel to be kept in a position to pervert the ways of justice. President Pierce nominated C. O. Harrison, of Kentucky, to take Lecompte's place, but for some unexplained cause the appointment was not confirmed in the Senate, and Judge Lecompte retained his place, and in ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... which has lost the principle of its animation becomes dust. Hence it is an axiom that the change or perversion of the principles by which anything was produced, is the destruction of that very thing; if you can change or pervert the principles from which anything springs, you destroy it. For instance, one single foreign element introduced into the blood produces death; one false assumption admitted into science, destroys its certainty; one false principle admitted into morals, is fatal. Now our American nation is departing ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... tragedy, but it was upon the stage; and that's the reason why your Reflectors would break the glass, which has shewed them their own faces. The business of the theatre is to expose vice and folly; to dissuade men by examples from one, and to shame them out of the other. And however you may pervert our good intentions, it was here particularly to reduce men to loyalty, by shewing the pernicious consequences of rebellion, and popular insurrections. I believe no man, who loves the government, would be glad to see the rabble in such a posture, as they were represented in our play; but if the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... deal and was known to take bread away from other prisoners at night. He was sentenced for 15 months for swindling. He himself related that in youth he had seen many monks and had become possessed of the idea of being one. He was a sex pervert. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... conduct, like so many individuals in a state of nature. The inhabitants of every country, under the civilisation of laws, easily civilise together, but governments being yet in an uncivilised state, and almost continually at war, they pervert the abundance which civilised life produces to carry on the uncivilised part to a greater extent. By thus engrafting the barbarism of government upon the internal civilisation of a country, it draws from the latter, and more especially from the poor, a great portion ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... may more secretly affect and afflict the bodies and minds of others; and, if he can prevail upon those that make a visible profession, it may be the better covert unto his diabolical enterprise, and may the more readily pervert others to consenting unto his subjection. So far as we can look into those hellish mysteries, and guess at the administration of that kingdom of darkness, we may learn that witches make witches by persuading one the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... subtile for the vulgar, it is certain, that all 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 there in human nature capable of subduing the natural ambition of men, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... touto lego). Neither is he desirous of hastening his own end, 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 according to his sophistry all his life long. He ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... were 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 ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... into the fire. Such 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 of the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... 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 ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... economists were the only ones to preach the permanent and often hereditary division of labour, we might allow them to preach it as much as they pleased. But the ideas taught by doctors of science filter into men's minds and pervert them; and from repeatedly hearing the division of labour, profits, interest, credit, etc., spoken of as problems long since solved, all middle-class people, and workers too, end by arguing like economists; they venerate the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... 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 humanity ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... I, sitting up,—I could not stand, for my legs were tied, and my arms fixed in a neat pair of steel handcuffs. "I have," said I, "unbelieving dogs! I have. Do you think to pervert a Christian gentleman from his faith and honor? Ruffian blackamoors! do your worst; heap tortures on this body, they cannot last long. Tear me to pieces: after you have torn me into a certain number of pieces, I shall not feel it; and if I ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Israel, little of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this took place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth, but because there was no interest in historic truth and no conception of it. The rewriting of a nation's history from the point of view of its priesthood bore, to the ancient Israelite, beyond question, an aspect altogether different from that which the same ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... steadily rises, evangelization making progress among the Mangyans, 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, Concepcion reports that their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... 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 much of having three witnesses to their wills? Those three witnesses, instead of two, make ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... 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, to shine in conversation, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Grant me not to deliver important opinions; for I do not desire these, but only to pervert the right for my own advantage, and to ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... speeches of any trouble you, who pervert the truth, that they may draw you aside from the truth of the Gospel which ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... masculine nose; a third observed, that she was awkward for want of seeing company; a fourth distinguished something very bold in her countenance; and, in short, there was not a beauty in her whole composition which the glass of envy did not pervert into a blemish. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires, and no diseases. But, when he began to sacrifice victims on the altar of superstition, to pursue the goat and the deer, and, by the pernicious invention of fire, to pervert their flesh into food, luxury, disease, and premature death, were let loose upon the world. Such is clearly the correct interpretation of the fable of Prometheus, which is the symbolical portraiture of that disastrous epoch, when ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... knowledge and experience they appear to have, they are stationed; and if they grumble at the duty assigned them, they are called mutinous rascals, and threatened with the cat; the warrant officers are charged to watch them closely, lest they should attempt to pervert the crew, and to prevent them from sending letters from the ship to their friends. Should any letters be detected on them, the sailors are charged, on pain of the severest punishment, to deliver them to ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... reveal: But such they were as pagan use required, Performed by women when the men retired, Whose eyes profane their chaste mysterious rites Might turn to scandal or obscene delights. Well-meaners think no harm; but for the rest, Things sacred they pervert, and silence is the best. Her shining hair, uncombed, was loosely spread, A crown of mastless oak adorned her head: When to the shrine approached, the spotless maid Had kindling fires on either altar laid; (The rites were such as were observed of old, By Statius in his Theban story told.) Then kneeling ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... 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 of ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... from Hell and his approach to the new world. To his 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 ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... A 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) and only once with an attempt to extort money. Permanent ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... energy, colour, and vast prodigality of ineffaceable pictures place it undoubtedly at the head of all the pictorial histories of modern times. And the dramatic rapidity of its action, and the inexhaustible contrasts of its scenes and tableaux—things which so fatally pervert its truthfulness as authentic history—immensely heighten the effect of the poem on the reader's mind. Not that Carlyle was capable of deliberately manufacturing an historical romance in the mendacious ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... show no 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 the more ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... 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 hence you ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... insane, whose crimes spring from inherited perverse instincts. These unfortunate beings cannot be consigned to ordinary prisons, since, owing to their state of mental alienation, they do not possess even the modesty of the vicious—hypocrisy—and they never fail to pervert those criminaloids with whom they come in contact. Malcontents by nature, they distrust everybody and everything, and as they see an enemy in every warder and official, they are ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... commission of great misdeeds. As hunters it is divided between the toil of the chase, the idleness of repose, or the indulgence of inebriation. Hunting is but a licentious idle life, and if it does not always pervert good dispositions; yet, when it is united with bad luck, it leads to want: want stimulates that propensity to rapacity and injustice, too natural to needy men, which is the fatal gradation. After this explanation of the effects which follow by living in the woods, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... Inquisition, and expulsion of the Jews—deeds so awful in their consequences, that the actual motive of the woman-heart which prompted them, is utterly forgotten, and herself condemned. We must indeed deplore the mistaken tenets that could obtain such influence—deplore that man could so pervert the service of a God of love, as to believe and inculcate that such things could be acceptable to Him; but we should pause, and ask, if we ourselves had been influenced by such teaching, could we break from ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... sense of lattice structure about it, is not to our old-fashioned minds nearly so fascinating as the wooden fabric of our early memories at more than one seaside resort of our boyhood. St. Sennan was of another school, or had become a convert or pervert, if a Saint may be judged by his pier. For this was iron or steel all through, barring the timber flooring whose planks were a quarter of an inch apart, so that you could kneel down to see the water through if you were too short to see over the advertisements a sordid spirit of commercialism ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... members of this committee of nine to construct a theory, by which they might seat their party associates under cover of legality. Not that they held any such explicit mandate from the party, nor that they deliberately went to work to pervert the law; they were simply under psychological pressure from which only men of the severest impartiality could free themselves. The work of drafting the majority report (it was a foregone conclusion that the committee would divide), fell to Douglas. It pronounced the law of 1842 "not ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... bodies. 2. A defence against the hostile elements. 3. An acknowledgment of our spiritual nakedness and exposure to the wrath of God; and our need to be clothed with the righteousness of Christ. Whenever we pervert it from these ends, to the gratification of our pride or vanity, we not only do not glorify God therein, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... act of virtue; hence a gloss on 2 Thess. 3:9, "That we might give ourselves a pattern unto you," says: "He who through idleness eats often at another's table, must needs flatter the one who feeds him." It is also written (Ex. 23:8): "Neither shalt thou take bribes which . . . blind the wise, and pervert the words of the just," and (Prov. 22:7): "The borrower is servant to him that lendeth." This is contrary to religion, wherefore a gloss on 2 Thess. 3:9, "That we might give ourselves a pattern," etc., says, "our religion calls men to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the 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, often hasty and erroneous ...
— 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 ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... what they know, which if they told it, would clear Temple Scott before this jury on the spot. And that isn't all, if you accept this story, you say that I haven't done my duty; you say that the man you elected to enforce the law will use his power to pervert the law; will fail to get all the facts before the jury. Because you couldn't imagine that there are such witnesses who came out looking for a pistol and I wouldn't have heard it and known about it. And if ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... appointed by the Belgian Government to inquire into the alleged cruelties of German soldiers, and the evidence thus obtained has been made the subject of diplomatic complaints. This attempt to pervert the ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... the spoil came to the hands of him and his ministers. What is this but a new learning; a new canker to rust and corrupt the old truth? Ye call your learning old: it may indeed be called old, for it cometh of that serpent which did pervert God's commandment and beguiled Eve; so it is an old custom to pervert God's word, and to rust it, ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... 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, at either place, spake ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... direct and indirect means. Their truth and fiction produce a consistent picture which we feel to be true. Dr. Knapp has shown, where the facts are accessible, that Borrow does not much neglect, mislay or pervert them. But neither Dr. Knapp nor anyone else has captured facts which would be of any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten wood or fungus; others show ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... abuse, v. misapply, misuse, pervert, desecrate, violate, profane; maltreat, mistreat; revile, reproach, vilify, vituperate, malign, traduce; violate, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... 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 could cultivate ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... 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
... when applied to faith, and that seldom, are laudable; but when they are drawn from the life and conversation, they are dangerous, and, when men make too many of them, pervert the doctrine of faith. Allegories are fine ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... by which superstition, united with politics, exert their efforts to pervert, abuse, and poison the heart of man; the generality of human institutions appear to have only for their object to abase the human character, to render it more flagitiously wicked. Do not then let us be at all astonished ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... young lady, the next time you pervert my officers and upset the discipline of the Federal Army—well, I don't know ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... its own religion, a lay religion. If I possess any other it is through its condescension and under restrictions. It is, by nature, hostile to other associations than its own; they are rivals, they annoy it, they absorb the will and pervert the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... years of life under pure domestic influences. Chester's daughter had carried a heart of gold to the Alms House, and she brought all this wealth away; but she was an impulsive, sensitive girl, and if Mrs. Farnham had no influence strong enough to pervert her nature, she had the power to thwart and annoy her beyond her capacities of ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... spinning; for we 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, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... 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 of the idealists. Give ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... they should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them, whether the Fasts should be admitted. Some said, the appearance of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection was over-ruled by Christmas Day, who had a design upon Ash Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire to see how the old Domine would behave himself ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... your head, as precious as your child and friend; wear her close to your heart, let her feel the warmth of it, and you may rest in peace; year after year she will cling closer to you, until you two are like Siamese twins. If you do not give her all that, you pervert her, estrange her by your worthlessness,—and she will leave you. She will leave you as soon as she sees nobler hands stretched out for her; she is forced to do it, as this warmth, this appreciation, are as necessary to her life as the ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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 against all kinds of inconclusive evidence which can be mistaken for conclusive, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... 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, and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the boy to lead it. And it will cost but little to put in the crossing and take a chance. Remember, Bryce, once we have that crossing in, it stands like a spite-fence between Pennington and the law which he knows so well how to pervert to suit his ignoble purposes." He turned earnestly to Bryce and waved a trembling admonitory finger. "Your job is to keep out of court. Once Pennington gets the law on us, the issue will not be settled in our favour for years; and in the meantime—you perish. Run along now and hunt up Ogilvy. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... say that no bowler ever throws consciously and wilfully; his action, however, may unconsciously develop into a throw. There would be no pleasure in argument, cricket, or any other sport if we knowingly cheated. Thus it is always unconsciously that adversaries pervert, garble, and misrepresent each other's opinions; unconsciously, not 'audaciously.' If people would start from the major premise that misrepresentations, if such exist, are unconscious errors, much ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... chastity is quickly overcome. 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. ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... 7. And would pervert the gospel of Christ. To paraphrase this sentence: "These false apostles do not merely trouble you, they abolish Christ's Gospel. They act as if they were the only true Gospel-preachers. For all that they muddle Law and Gospel. ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... *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 Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... been appointed by the Belgian Government to inquire into the alleged cruelties of German soldiers, and the evidence thus obtained has been made the subject of diplomatic complaints. This attempt to pervert the truth has ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... that every effort will be made by means of the existing Government machinery to obstruct and pervert even the smallest measure of reform, and bearing in mind the immense discretionary power accorded by the laws to all Government officials, the Uitlander Council are strongly of opinion that the understanding between the two Governments should provide for such immediate changes in the present ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... necessary instruction and the 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
... utmost achieved by the government of white men without their own consent is to weaken their capacity to assume the sacred responsibility of self-government. It is impossible to kill the idea of Home Rule, though it is possible, by retarding its realization, to pervert some of its strength and beauty, and to diminish the vital energy on which its fruition depends. And it is possible in the case of Ireland, up to and in the very hour of her emancipation, after a struggle more bitter and exhausting than any in the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 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
... afraid,' she returned, 'to leave him, I am afraid to leave any of them. When I am gone, they pervert—but they don't ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... 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 the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... commandments of God and faith or testimony of Jesus, is indisputable and clear. I say here then is demonstrated proof that Babylon has fallen, and whoever undertakes to prove the contrary must annihilate this people, or "pervert the scriptures." John further shows that this is a remnant (which of course means the last end) made war with, (his meaning is clear,) for "keeping the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ." xii: ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates
... ill, Falcone," said she. "You have abused my trust in you, and you have sought to pervert my son and to lead him into ways ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... many of its teachers and 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, like the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the great educator of the people, but it is the faithful handmaid of law and order and of public and private morals. Like all great callings, from which even the sacredness of the pulpit is not exempt, there are those who bring persistent dishonor upon journalism, and pervert its powers to ambition and greed; but discounted by all its imperfections, it is to-day the greatest of our great factors in maintaining the best attributes of our civilization and preserving social order and the majesty of law; and the duties ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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 charms, which constitute the real barrier between the Gallic mind and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the essential qualities of a good historical ballad is truth. To pervert history—to violate nature, in order to make a fine clatter, has been the aim in too many of the ballads sent us. He who goes to write a historical ballad should master the main facts of the time, and state them truly. It may be well for those perhaps either ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... that. Isn't that precisely the poor girl's complaint that everybody wants to use her as a sort of telephone connection with the other world? No. If you invite her here, receive her as a lady, not as a pervert. But, now, let us see. You say Clarke is going ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... congratulation of the church of Constantinople, held,(225) that they were to rest from labour upon no day but upon the Lord's day, whereby it appeareth, that holidays have had adversaries before us. I find that they pervert some places which they allege against us out of Calvin. Tilen allegeth,(226) Calvin. Inst., lib. 2, cap. 8, sec. 32, acknowledging alios quoque dies festos praeter dominicum, &c. I marvel how a judicious reader could imagine such a thing to be in that place, for ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... with all my soul I deny the fantastic superstition that our rule can benefit a people like this, a nation of one race, as different from ourselves as dark from light—in colour, religion, every mortal thing. We can only pervert their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 true ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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 results. But the prominence ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... 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 in ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... abandoning his 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 most ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural taste, and their ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Walter. "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
... now quite familiar to the people, first began to speak on the anti-slavery question, I felt that if the diffidence and modesty and delicacy of woman had not been sacrificed, it had, at any rate, been put in peril; and that, although a few might survive, the perilous example would pervert and destroy the imitators ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... great practical 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 much of having three witnesses to their wills? Those three witnesses, ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... 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 ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... to the false prophet, Rakkeed, when he was here; of the faithless priests who gave ear to his abominable heresies and allowed him to spew out his blasphemies in the temples; of those who sent spies to Krink, to corrupt and pervert my soldiers ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... appears to have been constantly and assiduously engaged in endeavoring to imbitter the minds of the colored population against the white. He rendered himself perfectly familiar with all those parts of the Scriptures which he thought he could pervert to his purpose, and would readily quote them to prove that slavery was contrary to the laws of God; that slaves were bound to attempt their emancipation, however shocking and bloody might be the consequences; and that such efforts would ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... is careless about little things; they will right themselves: persons of the baser sort pervert the freedom of the country to their own uses; they make 'corners' and 'rings' and steal the money of the municipality; never mind; some day, when we have time, we will straighten things out. In youth, also, one is tempted to gallant apparel, bravery of ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... 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
... French possess the Court, Pimps, priests, buffoons, in privy chambers sport; Such slimy monsters ne'er approach'd a throne Since Pharaoh's days, nor so defil'd a crown; In sacred ears tyrannic arts they croak, Pervert his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... 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 welfare of ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... Confession, whether the Pope has power to order it.' He commends confession, when a man humbles himself and, receives forgiveness of God through the lips of a Christian brother, but he denounces any compulsion in the matter, and warns men against priests who pervert it into a means of increasing their own power. He now expressed his public thanks to Sickingen, and dedicated the book to him—'To the just and firm Francis von Sickingen, my especial lord and patron.' In this dedication ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... warned you all now," he said, "and if after this I hear of a single perversion, woe be unto that pervert, for it is better for his miserable soul that he had never been born. Is there a man here base enough to sell his birthright for a mess of Mr. Lucre's pottage? Is there a man here, who is not too strongly ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... by the prophet Micah: "Hear this, I 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 ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... of lattice structure about it, is not to our old-fashioned minds nearly so fascinating as the wooden fabric of our early memories at more than one seaside resort of our boyhood. St. Sennan was of another school, or had become a convert or pervert, if a Saint may be judged by his pier. For this was iron or steel all through, barring the timber flooring whose planks were a quarter of an inch apart, so that you could kneel down to see the water through if you were too ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... rejected all geology and all science as profane and carnal; and some even, when pretending to call themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable policy, of tampering with the truth, investing the real facts in false disguises, to cringe to the prejudices of the many, and to pervert science into a seeming accordance with popular prepossessions." I cannot believe that this will be regarded as justifiable language: it seems scarce worthy of a man of science; and will, I fear, only be accepted as good in evidence that the odium theologicum is not ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... 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 ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... us that their voice has been so long 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, ...
— 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
... 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, in his triumphant recognition ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Frost. I should probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. "I am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, "but I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing a moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of course, that there are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling them either ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... and Edwin 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 learned admire, 'Thus dissipate and quench the soul's ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... 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
... change these foolish sentiments? Would you pervert us? Will you not convert yourself? Lords! you perceive now very clearly what an obstinate fellow this is! Therefore let him be stripped and put into a great caldron of boiling oil. Let him ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... works of the devil. Sin is the work of the devil; "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 ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... going to talk to you about that, Marshal," said Queen Selina. "There are many reasons why it is undesirable that Miss Heritage should remain here any longer. After the underhand and ungrateful manner in which she has tried to pervert Prince Mirliflor from his attachment to Princess Edna, I feel it my ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... show, if they can, where God has enjoined priests to marry. Besides, we find in the divine law that vows once offered should be paid, Ps. 49 and 75; Eccles. 5, Ps. 50:14, 76:11; Eccles. 5:4. Why, therefore, do they not observe this express divine law? They also pervert St. Paul, as though he teaches that one who is to be chosen bishop should be married when he says: "Let a bishop be the husband of one wife;" which is not to be understood as though he ought to be married, for then Martin, Nicolaus, Titus, John the Evangelist, ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... avert, 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, averse, versus, versification, animadversion, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... 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 ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... 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' weakness for cocaine ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... meet a pervert who, with a glib tongue, protests that his conscience drove him from the Church, that his enslaved intelligence needed deliverance, search him and you will find a skeleton in his closet; and if ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... interpreted, opposed them, seeking to turn away the proconsul from the 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 proconsul seeing ...
— The New Testament • Various
... 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 ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... is satisfied with this interpretation, and follows it. He ought to have been familiar with the unchanging practice of the Jews to pervert Scripture by substituting a material meaning for a spiritual one, in order to gain glory among men. Could anything more derogatory to the holy patriarch be said than that he gave such expression to his joy over the birth of his son Noah on ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... reformation in religion. But, although a proper and just reformation were allowed to be necessary, even to preserve Christianity itself, yet the passions and vices of men had mingled themselves so far, as to pervert and confound all the good endeavours of those who intended well: And thus the reformation, in every country where it was attempted, was carried on in the most impious and scandalous manner that can possibly be conceived. To which unhappy proceedings we owe all the just reproachings that Roman ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... he was staying with us he was for ever telegraphing, cabling to America, or decoding messages. There was no peace in the house, by day or by night. Finally I made a stand. 'Gregory,' I said, 'you shall not pervert my servants with your odious tips, and turn my home into a public stock-exchange. Take your bulls and bears over to the Savoy and play with them there, and leave Doris to me.' And he did!" she ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... cease to 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 ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... tempestuous waves of 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 ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... ancient privileges of the protestant churches, and the decrees which had been, from time to time, made in favour of the protestants. But the investigation of these things was carried on with the most manifest partiality; old charters were wrested to a wrong sense, and sophistry was used to pervert the meaning of every thing, which tended to ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... This is the teaching of "Tintern Abbey," in which the best part of our life is shown to be the result of natural influences. According to Wordsworth, society and the crowded unnatural life of cities tend to weaken and pervert humanity; and a return to natural and simple living is the only remedy ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the abuse of Councils progressively from the Nicene to that of Trent, and our knowledge of the causes, occasions, and mode of such abuse, are so far presumptive for its non-recurrency as to render it less probable that honest men will pervert them from ignorance, and more difficult for unprincipled men to do so designedly. Something too must be allowed for an honourable ambition on the part of the persons so assembled, to disappoint the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... 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 far decent democratic ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... been at sea; and according to the knowledge and experience they appear to have, they are stationed; and if they grumble at the duty assigned them, they are called mutinous rascals, and threatened with the cat; the warrant officers are charged to watch them closely, lest they should attempt to pervert the crew, and to prevent them from sending letters from the ship to their friends. Should any letters be detected on them, the sailors are charged, on pain of the severest punishment, to deliver them to some of ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... and most able critics have proved that, even in lesser matters, the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament have suffered less from the injuries of time and the errors of transcribers than any other ancient writings whatever; and that the very worst manuscript extant would not pervert one article of our faith, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... gloat o'er the 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 Justice ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... and wealthy 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 guide the car ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... a gentleman. He took his degree at Oxford, and then became what we call a pervert, and what I suppose they call a convert. He has not got a shilling in the world beyond what they pay him as a priest, which I take it amounts to about as much as the wages of a day labourer. He told me the other day that he was absolutely ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... and consider well who will justly bear the blame for those things which will 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 compelled him to ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... life.... History presents us with even University Systems of Education (so called) entirely destitute of all practical character; and there are elementary systems which tend as much to prejudice and pervert, not to say corrupt, the popular mind as to ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... 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 sugar-coated natural history to the real thing, but the danger ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... people are exposed, who have the misfortune to be governed by a Popish Prince. As the King is naturally powerful, he can easily dispose of the places of importance, and trust, so as to have them filled with creatures of his own, who will engage in any enterprise, or pervert any law, to serve the purposes of the reigning Monarch. Had not the nation an instance of this, during the short reign of the very Popish Prince, against whom Settle contended? Did not judge Jeffries, a name justly devoted ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... 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. ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... created before Adam, but the Holy One—blessed be He!—said, "Should he pervert things as I make them, then there will be no one to rectify them; so behold I will create Adam first, and if he should make things crooked, then Abraham following him ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... themselves about the consequences, was the great rule of action. I grant it; yet, notwithstanding, I refuse to stigmatize, as many have done, those men who have committed the fault of hesitating; I feel that to rank them among the champions of slavery is to pervert facts, and to fall into a blamable exaggeration. Again, to-day, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, cannot citizens be cited in the North who are devoted to the cause of the negroes, but who refuse to participate in abolitionist demonstrations, because they fear (and the ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... 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, and nerve them for exertion in the important enterprise ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... his audience were 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 ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... that they were expecting her all the time to break out in the praises of Luther, or of Henry VIII., or of some one whom they had been taught to execrate; and whenever she opened her lips they thought she was going to pervert them, and were quite surprised when she only made a remark, like other people, on the carriages ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ruin to calamities for which he was in no way responsible. Kind-hearted Mrs. Mozeen was just the woman to take a motherly interest in a well-disposed lad like Joseph; and it was equally characteristic of my valet—especially when Rothsay was thoughtless enough to encourage him—to pervert an innocent action for the sake of indulging in a stupid jest. I took advantage of my privilege as an invalid, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... all the good things which we enjoyed aforetime. Shall we receive those at the hands of the Lord, and not bear to receive hard things likewise? But I perceive now why thou so speakest. Come forth, thou that standest behind her to pervert her heart and make her speak as one of the foolish women. Hide thyself no longer; come forth and withstand me to the face." Then Satan came forth from behind my wife, and stood before me ashamed, and even ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... we may be the cause of the ignorance we call involuntary, it is impossible to determine. A wrong act, an improper thought, belonging to years ago and even repented of since, may project its dark shadow into the present, and pervert the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... around whomever they pleased, making him waste away until he died. They averred that mandragora, torn from beneath the gallows by the teeth of a dog, who invariably died therefrom, enabled them to pervert the understanding; to turn men into beasts, to give women over to idiotcy and madness. Still more dreadful was the furious frenzy caused by the Thorn-apple, or Datura, which made men dance themselves to death, and go through a thousand ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... 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 ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 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
... 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 consequences to a greater or less extent, warring ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... Now,—not to pervert the intent Of a courtesy gentle and rare, Or observance so civilly meant With disparaging ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... 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 ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... measures looking toward permanent Re- establishment are concerned, no consideration should tempt us to pervert the national victory into oppression for the vanquished. Should plausible promise of eventual good, or a deceptive or spurious sense of duty, lead us to essay this, count we must on serious consequences, ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... by what means can society give to each one of its members the necessary instruction and the 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 it just ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... style of soldier that the Commander-in-Chief liked to have about him, and he allowed his personal prejudices to pervert his judgment. ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... 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 guide ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... resumed M. Fauvel. "A father not only pardons, he forgets. Do I not know the terrible temptations that beset a young man in a city like Paris? There are some inordinate desires before which the firmest principles must give way, and which so pervert our moral sense as to render us incapable of judging between right and wrong. ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... a Means of Sexual Enjoyment.—There is a form of sexual perversion in which the pervert takes delight in being subjected to degrading, humiliating, and cruel acts on the part of his or her associate. It was named masochism from Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian novelist, whose works describe this form of perversion. The victims are said to experience peculiar pleasure at the sight of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... taking from the enlightened book-mongers their 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 wedded ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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, Concepcion reports that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... polite about the whole thing and protectively pervert the original spelling of "Rabbit" to "Rarebit" in their culinary guides. We have heard that once a club of ladies in high society tried to high-pressure the publishers of Mr. Webster's dictionary to change the old spelling in their favor. ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... staying with us he was for ever telegraphing, cabling to America, or decoding messages. There was no peace in the house, by day or by night. Finally I made a stand. 'Gregory,' I said, 'you shall not pervert my servants with your odious tips, and turn my home into a public stock-exchange. Take your bulls and bears over to the Savoy and play with them there, and leave Doris to me.' And he did!" she ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... 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, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... to-night," said Lady Blanchemain. "I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress, she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,—well, a word to ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... you say by declaring that the Republican 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 to ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... nation; no pestilence or famine. We do not labour at present under any scheme of taxation new or oppressive in the quantity or in the mode. Nor are we engaged in unsuccessful war, in which our misfortunes might easily pervert our judgment, and our minds, sore from the loss of national glory, might feel every blow of fortune ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... disnatured breast may tear her child, Flesh of her flesh, and of her bone the bone, And dash the smiling babe against a stone; But I, (forbid it, Heaven!) but I can ne'er The love of Gotham from this bosom tear; Can ne'er so far true royalty pervert From its fair course, to do my people hurt. With how much ease, with how much confidence— As if, superior to each grosser sense, 30 Reason had only, in full power array'd, To manifest her will, and be obey'd— Men make resolves, and pass into decrees The motions of the mind! with how much ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... 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, in his ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the school-room will cause the rising generation to look slightingly on the "essentials." I have in my possession numerous letters from Highland teachers dealing with this fear on the part of the clergy, that novels and secular literature generally will pervert the minds of the people. The addition of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's books to a library was recently likened to the arrival ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... wizards, that they shall be the instruments by whom he may more secretly affect and afflict the bodies and minds of others; and, if he can prevail upon those that make a visible profession, it may be the better covert unto his diabolical enterprise, and may the more readily pervert others to consenting unto his subjection. So far as we can look into those hellish mysteries, and guess at the administration of that kingdom of darkness, we may learn that witches make witches by persuading one the other to subscribe to a book or articles, &c.; and the Devil, having ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... predestinate purpose that men should be and must be therein. Such persons pull and hale the Scriptures to prove it, though, indeed, they neither have the knowledge of the true God nor the understanding of Scripture. These justifiers and disputers assist the Devil steadfastly and pervert God's truth and change it into lies."[35] He closed his book with these daring words: "Should Peter or Paul seem to have written otherwise, then look to the essence, look to the heart [i.e. to interior meaning]. If you lay hold of the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 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 victims ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... new individuals, or the preservation of the race. Nutrition is a purely selfish process; reproduction is purely unselfish in its object; though the human species—unlike the lower animals, which, while less intelligent, are far more true to nature—too often pervert its functions to ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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 favorable ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... grammatically with the immediately preceding words or phrases, that they should be read without a perceptible pause, or with only a slight one for breath, without change of voice. Some of the commas would grossly pervert the meaning if strictly construed. Thus, from No. 3 it would appear that the people of the United States in general lived adjacent to the frontier; from No. 4, that all observers have recently investigated the point in question; from No. 6, that ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... to pervert language, fixing new meanings to words in common use which are in direct opposition to established usage? The man who knows the meaning of a word and uses it in a contrary sense is guilty of an abuse of language; and if he fails to make known the fact that he is using the term in a sense ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... politicians) is said to be at the Widow Peasley's, quietly awaiting the call. The name of Austen Vane—another messenger says—is running like wildfire through the hall, from row to row. Mr. Crewe has no chance—so rumour goes. A reformer (to pervert the saying of a celebrated contemporary humorist) must fight Marquis of Queensberry to win; and the People's Champion, it is averred, has not. Shrewd country delegates who had listened to the Champion's speeches and had come to the capital prepared to vote for purity, had been observing the movements ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 compelled him ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... knew the reason of his purpose to leave 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 ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... popular talents, of figure and fortune in the world, and without the advantages of apparent disinterestedness on their side, will allways have address enough, with a seeming plausibility, to pervert every act of Government at home, and to defame and run down every publick transaction abroad; and disciples will never be wanting of capacity and passions fitted to become the dupes of such false apostles. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... exchange rate; bureau de change. chemistry, alchemy; progress, growth, lapse, flux. passage; transit, transition; transmigration, shifting &c v.; phase; conjugation; convertibility. crucible, alembic, caldron, retort. convert, pervert, renegade, apostate. V. be converted into; become, get, wax; come to, turn to, turn into, evolve into, develop into; turn out, lapse, shift; run into, fall into, pass into, slide into, glide into, grow into, ripen into, open into, resolve ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that I would say, and it is this. Jesus has come to set the captives of sin free from its mockery, its tyranny, its worst consequences. He breaks the power of past evil to domineer over us. He gives us a new life within, which has no heritage of evil to pervert it, no memories of evil to discourage it, no bias towards evil to lead it astray. As for the sins that we have done, He is ready to forgive, to seal to us God's forgiveness, and to take from our own self-condemnation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... than once had he 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 joined in the death-dealing battle, he saw the daily commission of crimes which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... of Prague, after Wiclif, and that with the congratulation of the church of Constantinople, held,(225) that they were to rest from labour upon no day but upon the Lord's day, whereby it appeareth, that holidays have had adversaries before us. I find that they pervert some places which they allege against us out of Calvin. Tilen allegeth,(226) Calvin. Inst., lib. 2, cap. 8, sec. 32, acknowledging alios quoque dies festos praeter dominicum, &c. I marvel how a judicious reader could imagine such a ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... tendency, and corrupt its effects. 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 of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... 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 ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... Ignatian 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 been quite successful; and ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... the best,' replied Portia, 'I believe, Nicomachus, may often come the worst. There is naught so perfect and so wise, but human passions will mar and pervert it. I should not wonder if, in ages to come, this peace-loving faith of the Christians, should it survive so long, should itself come to preside over scenes as full of misery and guilt as those you have to-day seen in the streets ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... still bewildered about me, imagining that I am a pervert. But anybody who reads my stuff from the beginning (a Shelleyan beginning, as far as it could be labelled at all) will find implicit, and sometimes explicit, the views which, in their more matured form, will appear ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... arrival, communicate to me his views, which, however romantic, are consistent both with the training of his previous life and the change which hath been effected in his feelings? And doubtful myself, lest the gracious impression he made upon me might pervert my judgment, did I not set a watch upon his motions, and find them all to harmonize with his frank and gallant bearing? I see no cause to alter my conduct or withdraw my confidence. Yet will I be guarded in our intercourse. ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... master 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
... of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed to be a part of the Bible. All the missionaries work up their French on it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel. It is the greatest story that was ever written about ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... despot. 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, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... lay convent has its own religion, a lay religion. If I possess any other it is through its condescension and under restrictions. It is, by nature, hostile to other associations than its own; they are rivals, they annoy it, they absorb the will and pervert the votes of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... are allowed to trespass. The idea is preposterous. And yet men who are regarded as standard authority upon economic questions impose this sophistry of overproduction and pressure of population upon mankind, and are applauded for their ignorance, or the cupidity which makes them to pervert the truth. ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... 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, and nerve them ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... world read the 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 ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... 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, to shine in conversation, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... a tragedy which, because it bears the form of art, is acceptable and even longed for. This is the allurement of war, its persistent illusion, perhaps. The aesthetic forms of war take war out of the field of reason, and on occasion make it transcend or pervert reason. So we may understand why it is true that sometimes those who but little understand why they are to die on the field of battle may display the greatest courage and the greatest enthusiasm for war, and we must not say that these causes are fatuous because ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... them to steal. When you declare martial law you punish the innocent with the guilty, in one sense; and so you do in a hundred cases. All we have to ask is, if it be not wiser and better to disarm demagogues, and those disturbers of the public peace who wish to pervert their right of suffrage to so wicked an end, by so simple a process, than to suffer them to effect their purposes by the most flagrant abuse ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... suddenly sneering at herself she added: "Poor fish! Can't even accept what you know is a fact without trying to blame it on some one else. You've scorned Bob for being such a fool, but here you are, ten times worse, because you have wits enough yet you pervert the use of them. Eleanor Maynard, I just feel as if I wanted to give you the biggest hiding ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... mechanical creature: incapable, of observing, just capable of taking an impression here and there; and in such cases the impressions that come are stamped on hot wax; they keep the scene fresh; they partly pervert it as well. Temple's version is, I am sure, the truer historical picture. He, however, could never repeat it twice exactly alike, whereas I failed not to render image for image in clear succession as they had struck me at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 most ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... and the people, being dazzled with his cheats, and stubbornly adhering to his pernicious doctrine, worshipped him even as a deity. Therefore he continually blasphemed the ways of the Lord, and those who were desirous to be converted from idolatry did he labor to subvert in their faith, and to pervert from Christ. And almost in the same manner as Simon Magus resisted Saint Peter did he oppose Saint Patrick. And on a certain time, when he was raised from the earth by the prince of darkness and the powers of the air, and the king and ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 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
... who was "his anchor in these 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
... helpful relation between a firm will and a luminous intelligence. The training of his mind, the awakening of his imagination, the formation of his taste and style, the humorous dramatizing of his experience,—all this discipline had failed to pervert his character, narrow his sympathies, or undermine his purposes. His intelligence served to enlighten his will, and his will, to establish the mature decisions of his intelligence. Late in life the two faculties ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... We may pervert, or rather misstate the fact in more than one way, to our own hurt. We may say cynically, David had his good points and his bad ones, as all your great saints have. Look at them closely, and in spite of all their pretensions you will find them no better than their neighbours. ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... pride was at least equal to that of Gwenwyn himself, "you pervert the proverb of Taliessin—it is the flattering harp ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... with her, taunted her with this fault, with most bitter insult, calling her wine-bibber. With which taunt she, stung to the quick, saw the foulness of her fault, and instantly condemned and forsook it. As flattering friends pervert, so reproachful enemies mostly correct. Yet not what by them Thou doest, but what themselves purposed, dost Thou repay them. For she in her anger sought to vex her young mistress, not to amend her; and did it in private, either for that the time and place of the quarrel ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... left his own rank, and dared to love a maiden of low degree! and oh! stinging agony of all—how she, in return, had loved him! Then the other nature spoke up, and bade him remember the anguish he should so prepare for Mary! At first he refused to listen to that better voice; or listened only to pervert. He would glory in her wailing grief! he would take pleasure ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... mind, which formerly characterized this nation. 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 very names of affection and kindred, which were the bond ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rest, be it nowise apprehended, that any personal connection of ours with Teufelsdrockh, Heuschrecke or this Philosophy of Clothes, can pervert our judgment, or sway us to extenuate or exaggerate. Powerless, we venture to promise, are those private Compliments themselves. Grateful they may well be; as generous illusions of friendship; as fair mementos of bygone unions, of those nights and suppers of the gods, when, lapped in ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... pirate. I had been deceived—shamefully deceived and wronged—by wealthy and powerful men. I had appealed to the law of my country, and the law refused to right me. No, not the law, but those who sat on the judgment-seat to pervert the law. It matters not now; I was driven mad at the time, for the wrong done was not done so much to me as to those whom I loved. I vowed ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... Rye" give Borrow's character and soul by direct and indirect means. Their truth and fiction produce a consistent picture which we feel to be true. Dr. Knapp has shown, where the facts are accessible, that Borrow does not much neglect, mislay or pervert them. But neither Dr. Knapp nor anyone else has captured facts which would be of any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten wood or fungus; others show ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... misery on earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned, body and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man. The very fact that she is held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse. Chattel slavery was not so bad; for, though the master might pervert religion for his own satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave. Never yet did I see a negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his master; and therefore there was always some dream of release. But who has not heard of ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the parties are liable to differ in their intellectual capacities, and that one, or the other, or both, are undoubtedly under the influence of such passions as rivalry, hatred, avarice, and ambition. passions that are nearly certain to pervert their judgments, and very likely to corrupt their motives, all probabilities founded upon a mere numerical majority, in one party, or the other, vanish at once; and the decision of the majority becomes, to ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... accept those stiff wooden figures for the ideals of ecclesiastical sanctity. In any case we must protest against any presentation of our great warm-hearted Beethoven in the guise of such sanctity. If THEY cannot bring out the difference between Beethoven, whom they do not comprehend and therefore pervert, and Schumann, who, for very simple reasons, IS incomprehensible, they shall, at least, not be permitted to assume ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... standing, such errors are scarcely to be wondered at, particularly when they are found to correspond with the partialities and prejudices of the narrator. These, strengthening as we grow older, gradually pervert or at least alter, the accuracy of our recollections, until they assimilate them to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... that he separated himself from his girl;—but still he thought that he might perhaps best in this way bring about a result which would be so manifestly for her advantage. It might be that the books of poetry and the modes of thought which his wife described as "Ushanting" were of a nature to pervert his girl's mind from the material necessities of life and that a little hardship would bring her round to a more rational condition. With a very heavy heart he consented to do his part,—which was to consist mainly of silence. Any words which might be considered expedient were to come ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... Shuhite 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 scroll And of ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... to have been created before Adam, but the Holy One—blessed be He!—said, "Should he pervert things as I make them, then there will be no one to rectify them; so behold I will create Adam first, and if he should make things crooked, then Abraham following him will make them ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... 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 with tears ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the king's administration. While he depressed the nobility, he exalted, and honored, and caressed the lawyers; and by that means both bestowed authority on the laws, and was enabled, whenever he pleased, to pervert them to his own advantage. His government was oppressive; but it was so much the less burdensome, as, by his extending royal authority, and curbing the nobles, he became in reality the sole ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... purpose of directly connecting this authority with the idea of the Supreme Being. For this would be, not an immanent, but a transcendent use of moral theology, and, like the transcendent use of mere speculation, would inevitably pervert and frustrate the ultimate ends ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and was known to take bread away from other prisoners at night. He was sentenced for 15 months for swindling. He himself related that in youth he had seen many monks and had become possessed of the idea of being one. He was a sex pervert. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... teachings and defied her own belief. She would not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she was never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and dogged efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. His mind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come to feel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been led to by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree at least, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... On which alone our weal depended.[28] When up a dangerous faction starts,[29] With wrath and vengeance in their hearts; By solemn League and Cov'nant bound, To ruin, slaughter, and confound; To turn religion to a fable, And make the government a Babel; Pervert the laws, disgrace the gown, Corrupt the senate, rob the crown; To sacrifice old England's glory, And make her infamous in story: When such a tempest shook the land, How could unguarded Virtue stand! ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... did, or did not, pervert the ballad, and turn a false Elliot into a false Scott version, cannot be obtained unless new documents bearing on the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... mind of Ned Hinkley a bitter dislike to the youth, because of some quarrel which Brother Stevens is said to have had with William Hinkley. This dislike hath made him conceive evil things of Brother Stevens and to misunderstand and to pervert some conversation which he hath overheard which Stevens hath had with his companion. Truly, indeed, I think that Alfred Stevens is a worthy youth of whom we ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and devices, of those who call themselves gentlemen, yet pervert the design of Providence, in giving them ample means to do good, to their own everlasting perdition, and the ruin of ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... occasion of the worst. 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 ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... 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 hills were covered; and lest you should think ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... 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 ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... still! Thy Gallantry and Beauty's all thy own; Paris could add no Graces to thy Air; nor yet pervert it into Affectation. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... like a skilful geometrician, 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 she only is; and therefore, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... why I say that I do not know whether simplicity belongs to nature or art is that fashion is as strong to pervert and disfigure in savage nations as it is in civilized. It runs to as much eccentricity in hair-dressing and ornament in the costume of the jingling belles of Nootka and the maidens of Nubia as in any court or ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is to be lamented, that mothers who are inclined to piety, should pervert even the means of salvation to their destruction—commit the greatest irregularities while apparently pursuing that which should produce the most regular ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... Lenine and 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 school ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... the devil; "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 ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... 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 are ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... said the Queen, with a sigh; "and I am to blame grievously that I did so pervert to earth a mind that might otherwise have learned holier examples;—nay, smile not with that haughty lip, my brother; for believe me—yea, believe me—there is more true valour in the life of one patient ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... do that as to eat an apple. That is my religion, and I feel that our platter is pretty near clean of some things, and we calculate to keep it clean from this time henceforth and forever .... And if men and women will not live their religion, but take a course to pervert the hearts of the righteous, we will 'lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet,' and we will let you know that the earth can swallow you up as did Koran with his hosts; and, as Brother Taylor says, you may dig your graves, and we will slay ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... against Dublin College could be heard in the polemical din, although it was well known that its literary honours stamped preliminary degradation on the Catholic aspirant, and were used at once to mock his political condition and pervert his faith—no voice was heard although one at least of the prelates had obtained degrees in the University, while the bishop and priests of an entire diocese, in conclave assembled, solemnly resolved that they would refuse sacraments ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... voiceless child may teach you lessons you will do well to follow. Let that poor hand of hers lie gently on your hearts; for there may be something in its healing touch akin to that of the Great Master whose precepts you misconstrue, whose lessons you pervert, of whose charity and sympathy with all the world, not one among you in his daily practice knows as much as many of the worst among those fallen sinners, to whom you are liberal in nothing but the ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... rationem, quae est proprium principium humanorum actuum, saith Aquinas,(1179) thereupon inferring that illis mores dicuntur boni, qui rationi congruunt; mali autem, qui a ratione discordant. Dr Forbesse doth therefore pervert the question whilst he saith,(1180) in hac cum fratribus quaestione, hoc bonum est quod necessarium. Nay, those actions we call morally good which are agreeable to right reason, whether they be necessary or not. Since, then, those actions are laudable and remunerable which are ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... end of Italy to the other, nothing is listened to in the way of music but Rossini and his imitators. The man must have a transcendant genius, who can lead and pervert the taste of his age as Rossini has done; but unfortunately those who have not his talent, who cannot reach his beauties nor emulate his airy brilliance of imagination, think to imitate his ornamented style by merely crowding note upon note, semi-quavers, demi-semi-quavers, and semi-demi-semi-quavers ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... they have received preferment have not invested them with the power of arbitrarily managing their 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 purpose ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... devil in him seek to pervert this loveliest of young women and feed on her humiliation for one flashing minute? The taste had gone, the desire of the vengeance was extinct, personal gratification could not exist. He spied into himself, and set it down to one ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by 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 ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... circumstances, Sir,' said Edith, flashing her disdainful glance upon him, 'and I know that you pervert them. You may not know it. I ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... and who has not, may be so apparent, that the World may not misplace their Favour; but unless they do it with more Impartiality, Temper and Candour than of late, they may, with equal prospect of Success, endeavour to turn the current of the Thames, as to pervert the Humour of ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... be too subtile for the vulgar, it is certain, that all 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 there in human nature capable of subduing the natural ambition of men, and forcing them to ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... 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 influence ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... ensued: and Edwin 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 learned admire, 'Thus dissipate and quench ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... we make our crop of criminals, just as we make our idiots, blind, crippled, and generally defective. Everyone is a baby first, and a baby is not a criminal, unless we make it so. It never would be,—in right conditions. Sometimes a pervert is born, as sometimes a two-headed calf is born, but they ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... to talk to you about that, Marshal," said Queen Selina. "There are many reasons why it is undesirable that Miss Heritage should remain here any longer. After the underhand and ungrateful manner in which she has tried to pervert Prince Mirliflor from his attachment to Princess Edna, I feel it my ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... still more: those in modern scores are rather more difficult, it is true; but, with very few exceptions, there is nothing in them impossible of execution; composers, masters of their art, write them with care, and as they ought to be executed. If it is from idleness that the simplifiers pervert them, the energetic orchestral conductor is armed with the necessary authority to compel the fulfilment of their duty. If it is from incapacity, let him dismiss them. It is his best interest to rid himself of instrumentalists ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... astonished Mandarin, looking around the room as though to discover in what crevice the unheard-of attributes were hidden. "This person's weaknesses? Can the sounding properties of this ill-constructed roof thus pervert one word into the semblance of another? If not, the bounds set to the admissible from the taker-down of the spoken word, Ming-shu, do not in their most elastic moods extend to calumny and distortion. . . . The one before you has no weaknesses. . . . Doubtless before another ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... and receive necessary 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
... from me vanity and lies,' Psa. 119. Every deviation from rectitude and truth is sin. Who that knows any thing of the corruption of the human heart, and its strange tendency to stray, to err, yea, even to pervert the plainest, simplest, and most obvious truths, but must see the propriety of his joining the psalmist, and crying out, Lord, remove far from me ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... who are not disgusted by such ineptitudes, perplex weak minds, and pervert vain ones. Of such discussions it may be said with the son of Sirach, that "when a man hath done, then he beginneth; and when he leaveth off, then he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... domestic influences. Chester's daughter had carried a heart of gold to the Alms House, and she brought all this wealth away; but she was an impulsive, sensitive girl, and if Mrs. Farnham had no influence strong enough to pervert her nature, she had the power to thwart and annoy her beyond her capacities of ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... extensive of Public Bodies find a sort of spokesman. Whereby at least we may judge of one thing: what a humour the once sniffing mocking City of Paris and Baron Clootz had got into; when such exhibition could appear a propriety, next door to a sublimity. It is true, Envy did in after times, pervert this success of Anacharsis; making him, from incidental 'Speaker of the Foreign-Nations Committee,' claim to be official permanent 'Speaker, Orateur, of the Human Species,' which he only deserved to be; and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
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