"Perverted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the parallel of knowledge derived by men in any other way. So also God stood over against nature. God was indeed declared to have made nature. He had, however, but given it, so to say, an original impulse. That impulse also it had in some strange way lost or perverted, so that the world, though it had been made by God, was not good. For the most part it moved itself, although God's sovereignty was evidenced in that he could still supervene upon it, if he chose. The supernatural was the realm of God. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Thought"[10] reveres but one thing in the world—his own thought. Wrapped up in this one idea, he admires the force and finesse of it, while his reason, detached from reality and having only him for an end, begins to weaken, becomes gradually perverted to the point where this man, harassed by a terrible doubt, begins to ask himself whether he is insane. In the long and pathetic story, "The Life of a Priest," we are shown the disturbance of the religious feelings of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... to humanity, but realized the iniquity of which she had been guilty towards him. It is the only instance of which we find notice of any such a remnant of conscience showing itself, at the time, among those perverted and depraved young persons. The reason, why it is probable that this exhibition of Churchill's penitential tears and agonies of remorse occurred immediately after the first day of Jacobs's examination, is this. It was one of the first, if not the first, held ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... old painters were helpless before it. They were driven to make mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality. It's not easy to idealise mere physical motherhood. You see, that was the wrong, perverted idea of motherhood—'conceiving without sin.' It's an unclean dogma in its implications. I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus—a sort of cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say seems now to have a certain crude truth in it. He said: 'There's ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... God, just as she regards her husband's gout as a calamity for herself, never seemingly thinking of how it affects the gentleman himself. Simple people might say the gout was his affair, not hers, but she does not view it so. In her perverted selfness, all things have relationship to her own ego, and so she is in continual trouble, like a girl whose love is being opposed by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... his Sunday evening receptions, his great following of earnest and enthusiastic refugees—every word of all this, which hardly anyone else could have equally well supplied, was retained intact in the published copy; yet the whole spirit of the thing had utterly evaporated, or rather had been perverted into the exact opposite unsympathetic channel. Where Ernest had written 'enthusiasm,' Lancaster had simply altered the word to 'fanaticism;' where Ernest had spoken of Herr Max's 'single-hearted devotion,' Lancaster had merely changed the phrase into 'undisguised revolutionary ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... rid of on Monday than on any other day of the week; Will,—theoretically the absolute determining power, practically limited in different degrees by the varying organization of races and individuals, annulled or perverted by different ill-understood organic changes; on all these subjects our knowledge is in its infancy, and from the study of some of them the interdict of the Vatican ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... words were enough; I understood now that this lovely girl, who half knelt, half lay, at my feet, was not the evil, perverted creature of Fu-Manchu whom we had gone out to arrest with the other vile servants of the Chinese doctor, but was the old, beloved companion of two years ago, the Karamaneh for whom I had sought long and wearily in Egypt, who had been ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... observe the perverted understanding and obstinate temper of Madame Montoni; but, not less grieved for her sufferings, she looked round for some alleviating circumstance to offer her. 'Your situation is, perhaps, not so desperate, dear madam,' said ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... Guildhall? The writer dared to express a hope that it was merely a form of Civic debauchery emanating from the oft-replenished toasts of the Devil's cup, rather than a classical intoxication which if persisted in might plunge the whole of London once more into the perverted darkness of ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... mankind:—that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if Michelangelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart—how could he have wrought more ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... did. Even I found myself liking her that day after lunch. I began to wonder if I had always been too hard on her, if I had had my judgment perverted by my jealousy." ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... utmost care and exactness, and in the vulgar language, are often perverted to wrong meanings; then why should we wonder that the ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... in some instances even later, to produce the most admirable works, combining the utmost technical perfection in touch and finish with most vivid and beautiful colouring. To this original school, however, had succeeded a perverted rage for imitating the Italian masters, which had been introduced into the Netherlands by a few painters of talent, particularly by Jean Mabuse and Bernard van Orley. To display their science by throwing their figures into forced and difficult positions and strongly marking the muscles, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... allegiance to our country, our sovereign, and our God. We contemplate ourselves as the WINNOWERS for the public." He then proceeds—"We desire to encourage the cloudless flames of rectified communion," rejecting "each effusion, however splendid, of degenerate curiosity and perverted genius—of misanthrophic ascerbity and calumnious retrospection." Such were the vows and resolutions of the father of journalists. He added, "the duties of our typo-graphic province are performed by the proprietor and one assistant." ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... scant, blemished, deficient, incomplete, perverted, short, corrupt, deformed, inferior, poor, spoiled, corrupted, fallible, insufficient, ruined, worthless. defaced, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... former. There is a great difference between these two mental derangements. The victim of homicidal impulse kills without any ulterior object, while the sadist kills in order to gratify his unnatural and perverted sexual appetite. ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... and Feelings. It is necessary to impress this point, because many girls and women, whose minds have been perverted by a vicious so-called morality, worry themselves to illness, brood and become hypochondriac because they think they have committed a grievous sin in experiencing a desire for sexual relations or for the embrace of a certain man. Altogether it is necessary to impress upon the growing girl, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... most likely to be sisters, and all the more when the black lace halted to exchange greetings with some one, and her face put on an expression so familiar to him, that he started forward and tried to catch her eye; but in vain, and he suffered agonies of doubt whether she had been perverted ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crotalus as a swift motion like that with which I had removed the cuye. The rattles never grew again, and my best snake was spoiled. Why the cuye should have cared to eat that mysterious husk which is so absolutely dry and flavorless, I can explain only by adding that rats and mice have the same perverted taste, and that it seems fairly a passion with them. I have had many skins and ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... started the first of his famed table d'hote dinners—would never have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to catering, "white man for white men" and to the inventing, elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral weakness Schomberg ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... but she ought to. I hate to see a nice girl, who would make some one a charming wife, perverted to these unholy uses. The crowning infamy heaped upon her head will be a full page in the Sunday Blast—'Another Harpie Exposed'—and it will come, Mrs. Rice, I am sure of it. Pratt fairly fawns before her now. She is his princess, his seeress, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... asylum, he had long ago deposited the little one. This good mother proceeded there, and the monks, after some hesitation, confessed what had become of it. She wished to see it; they showed it her. At its aspect she felt the same inward commotion which had, years before, perverted nature. She groaned, fainted, burst into tears, and never had the courage and firmness to embrace what ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Church against the attacks which threaten her destruction, with weapons suitable to the times; men who will turn all the genuine aspirations of the age, in science, in socialism, in politics, in spiritism, in religion, which are now perverted against the Church, into means of her ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. "A Red-blood man" is a phrase which explains itself, "Mollycoddle" is its opposite. We have adopted it from a famous speech of Mr. Roosevelt, and redeemed it—perverted it, if you will—to other uses. A few examples will make the notion clear. Shakespeare's Henry V. is a typical Red-blood; so was Bismarck; so was Palmerston; so is almost any business man. On the other hand, typical Mollycoddles were Socrates, Voltaire, and Shelley. The terms, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of the precise meaning of individual words. Etymologists would employ them in their original sense, and consider themselves justified by referring to their primitive import: others would use them according to their ordinary acceptation, which may be perverted; for in the currency of language, much is defective and counterfeit: but in general the authority of writers who are accredited, however they may disagree, is adopted. The intrinsic meaning of many words, especially the particles, will appear obscure; because they ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... to take its place in adult life is exploited by industry and repressed or perverted by a system of education which fits the children into a system of industry without giving them the insight and power to effect adjustments. The actual job in a trade has satisfying features which the school lacks. It pays wages. That fact for eager children is estimated ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... that had no life in it All the time she was thus busied, she spoke not a word to the princess, which, with the princess, went to confirm her notion of her purposes. But whatever she might have said would have been only perverted by the princess into yet stronger proof of her evil designs, for a fancy in her own head would outweigh any multitude of facts in another's. She kept staring at the fire, and never looked round to see what the ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... knowing the true religion, he has given over his children to the false, and that he has sacrificed their eternal welfare to his own worldly objects.[73] There is nothing which cannot be turned in an hostile and malignant manner by malignant and perverted ingenuity. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... the Wild Huntsman, who under the name of Samiel purchases the souls of men with his magic bullets, the folklorist and student of the evolution of religions sees one of many evidences of ancient mythology perverted to bring it into the service of Christianity. Originally the Wild Huntsman was Odin (or Wotan). The missionaries to the Germans, finding it difficult to root out belief in the ancient deities, gave their attributes to saints in a few cases, but for the greater part transformed them into ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... secretly capturing young children as they passed his castle and murdering them. When he was at last brought to justice it was proved that he had murdered something like a hundred children within a period of three years. So, at least, runs one version of the story of this perverted being. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... other instincts or feelings of our nature, is liable to become perverted, and to lead us astray. We acquire a relish for substances which are highly hurtful, such as tobacco, ardent spirits, malt liquors, and the like. We have "sought out many inventions," to pander to false and fatal tastes, ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... added, "the love of God, the love of country and of family, are one and the same thing; but it is sad to see the love of country perverted to satisfy the ambition of a man, and the love of God to exalt the pride and the desire to rule ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... flatterer. The breath of others raises our renown; Our own as surely blows the pageant down. Take up no more than you by worth can claim, Lest soon you prove a bankrupt in your fame. But own I must, in this perverted age, Who most deserve, can't always most engage. So far is worth from making glory sure, It often hinders what it should procure. Whom praise we most? The virtuous, brave, and wise? No; wretches, whom, in secret, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... of the Perverse, when he descends upon the printing office, sometimes becomes the Imp of the Perverted. Here his achievements will not bear reproducing. Suffice it to say that in point of indecency he displays the same superhuman ingenuity as in his more innocent pranks. His indecencies are all, indeed, in print, but fortunately scattered, and it would be a groveling nature that should seek ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... and floor space that the schoolroom should have in order to be adequately lighted! Not one in ten has as much window space as it should have, and a good portion of what has been provided is frequently covered up by shades thru the teacher's perverted notion of relative values—seeming to have greater appreciation for certain so-called artistic effects than for eye comfort and safety in work. And then again, these scientific friends of ours have told us that there should be in the schoolroom no cross ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... never know what you are doing: here we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business! Fine business, truly! If I were in your place, I would invent business a little bit better put together than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy example! They say women are perverse. Who perverted them?" ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... retarding has been the effort to give religion the function of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes for natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values which they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and confused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of natural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being exploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial despair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involved wonderful ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fruits are particularly pernicious. Plain animal food is found to be the most suitable to their state. The utmost care should be taken under all circumstances to procure genuine unadulterated bread for children, as the great support of life. If the perverted habits of the present generation give them an indifference as to what bread they eat, or a vitiated taste for adulterated bread, they still owe it to their children as a sacred duty, not to undermine their constitution ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... While listening to this perverted account of my temper and studies, you will not be surprised if I meditated for Mr. Fairservice the unpleasant surprise of a broken pate on the first decent opportunity. His friend only intimated his attention ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... is put up a pound to the can and bears a label which assures the consumer that it is a scientifically prepared, well-balanced ration. Maybe so. It is my personal opinion that the inventor brought to his task an imperfect knowledge of cookery and a perverted imagination. Open a can of Maconochie and you find a gooey gob of grease, like rancid lard. Investigate and you find chunks of carrot and other unidentifiable material, and now and then a bit of mysterious meat. The first man who ate an oyster had courage, but the last man who ate ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... other; and as Grace bowed her ear Mrs. Maynard touched her cheek with her dry lips. In this kiss doubtless she forgave the wrong which she had hoarded in her heart, and there perverted into a deadly injury. But they both knew upon what terms the pardon was accorded, and that if Mrs. Maynard had died, she would have died holding Grace answerable for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and piteous sighs secure Delights that live, when worlds no more endure? The sister-spirit long may lodge below, And pains from nature, pains from reason, know: Through all the common ills of life may run, By hope perverted and by love undone; A wife's distress, a mother's pangs, may dread, And widow-tears, in bitter anguish, shed; May at old age arrive through numerous harms, With children's children in those feeble arms: ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... very elegantly furnished, containing a piano, and a profusion of paintings. On examining one of these, Fanny turned away with a burning cheek—for it was one of those immodest productions of the French school, which show how art and talent can be perverted to the basest uses. She looked at no more of the pictures, but went to a window and looked out. The view from thence was not extensive, but merely included a garden of moderate size, surrounded by a high wall; the prospect was not a pleasant ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... orthodoxy imagined it to be, as well his duty as his interest, to uphold the claims of the supposed representative of Peter, and thus to maintain the cause of ecclesiastical unity. It might have been anticipated under such circumstances that Scripture would be miserably perverted, and that the see, which was believed to possess as its heritage the prerogatives of the apostle of the circumcision, would be the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... to eight thousand men, to risk a battle, giving out, however, as Buccleuch had done in his attempt to snatch James V from the hands of the Douglases, that it was not at the queen he was aiming, but solely at the regent, who kept her under his tutelage and perverted her good intentions. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... whole, I am persuaded that our Northern people behave full as well under the anti-slavery excitement as Southerners would if their consciences were perverted like ours, and we were the objects of their opposition. I think that a change will come over us. At the North, you have heard the wind, at midnight, after a warm rain, in winter, haul out to the north-west, and you know what a piping ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... grand arcade of elms over its avenue, spacious lawns, an elegant mansion, a luxurious flower-garden; but we are informed that happiness does not dwell there, that its owner is a misanthropic person, whose nature has been perverted by the selfishness of luxury; that there are no pleasant parties on the lawn, no happy wooing in that garden, no marriage festivals in those halls; and those possessions, which might have proved a blessing to generations yet unborn, are no better than a curse and a whited sepulchre. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Caraher's roadside saloon, contemplated the slow sinking, the inevitable collapse and submerging of one of their companions, the wreck of a career, the ruin of an individual; an honest man, strong, fearless, upright, struck down by a colossal power, perverted by an evil influence, go reeling to ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... from the cool seclusion of these trees' shade, to leave their delights and toil in the glare of the world at raising a mushroom growth on a dull, featureless plain that reaches everywhither. Modern Macbeths, sophisticated by your modernity and adding perverted instinct to crime, you are murdering not sleep, but dreams—dreams that haunt about the mouldering lodges of the past, and soften the contact with reality by lending their own colouring atmosphere. ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... kind—for I would not dignify the brawls and assassinations which have disgraced some of our southern cities, the offspring of low principles and an unregulated society, by comparing them to the class of crimes in question, which imply even in their atrocity a something of perverted honor, of extravagant affection, or at least of not ignoble passion—is the well-known Beauchamp tragedy of Kentucky, a tale of sin and horror which has afforded a theme to the pens of several distinguished writers, and the details ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... debtor, who might otherwise, in the state of mengiring, be only a burden to him. If the children of a deceased debtor are too young to be of service the charge of their maintenance is added to the debt. This opens a door for many iniquitous practices, and it is in the rigorous and frequently perverted exertion of these rights which a creditor has over his debtor that the chiefs are enabled to oppress the lower class of people, and from which abuses the English Residents find it necessary to be the most watchful to restrain ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... whose interest, and honour, and ambition were engaged to support it. All the wretched literature of the times was enlisted on that side: some faint glimmerings of common sense might sometimes pierce through the thick cloud of ignorance, or what was worse, the illusions of perverted science, which had blotted out the sun, and enveloped the face of nature: but those who preserved themselves untainted by the general contagion proceeded on no principles which they could pretend to justify: they were more indebted to their total want of instruction ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... the REVELATION, verses 18 to 29 is Thyatira the type of the Roman Catholic Church. In the 24th and 25th verses to those Roman Catholics "who have not known the depths of Satan," who has brought them so on the surface and perverted the truth of the doctrine, that they keep the shadow for truth, it is said: "I will put upon you none other burden. But that which ye have, hold fast till I come," REVEL. ii: 24 and 25. They have to keep the heavy burden ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... transferable as so much asset to the conquerors. It was upon this present tangible result that Rodney's imagination fastened, with an engrossment and tenacity that constitute a revelation of character. It perverted his understanding of conditions, and paralyzed his proper action as commander-in-chief. It is needless in this connection to consider whether it was the matter of personal profit, through legitimate prize-money, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... of a complete logical application of his whole system. He held Brougham to be 'insincere,'[40] a trimmer and popularity-hunter, but a useful instrument. Brougham's astonishing vanity and self-seeking prompted and perverted his amazing activity. He represents the process, perhaps necessary, by which a philosopher's ideas have to be modified before they can be applied to practical application. Brougham, however, could speak generously of men no longer in a position to excite ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... that it was found by Serapion in the churches of his diocese, Rhossus in Cilicia, that its use was at first permitted but afterwards forbidden, as it was found to favour Docetism, and that its contents were in the main orthodox though in some respects perverted [Endnote 110:3]. Obviously these facts and the name (which falls in with the theory—itself also somewhat unsubstantial—that Justin's Gospel must have a 'Petrine' character) are quite insufficient to build upon. The Protevangelium of James, which it is thought might ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... lay stress on any of these particulars, those who make them have not searched deeply into the need. The want is for that which at once includes these and precludes them; which would not be forbidden power, lest there be temptation to steal and misuse it; which would not have the mind perverted by flattery from a worthiness of esteem; it is for that which is the birthright of every being capable of receiving it,—the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe to use its means, to learn its secret, as far as Nature has ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... truth of the Bible;—that some men are made infidels by hearing the Trinity, Depravity, Atonement, Divinity of Christ, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment. True: and these men find "great laws of their nature,—instinctive feelings"—just such as you find against slavery, and not more perverted in them than in you, condemning all this Bible. And they hold now, with your sanction, that a book affirming such facts ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... is perverted to its very opposite, both in a religious and secular respect; on the one hand to the severest bondage, on the other to the most immoral excess—a barbarous intensity of every passion. The first ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be. Hero-worship endures for ever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and burst-out round ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... similar state, and was enduring equal woes. All that I suffered in my present condition she too was suffering—and from this there was no possibility of escape. Perhaps her surroundings were even worse, and her sufferings keener; for who could tell what these people might inflict in their strange and perverted impulses? ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... humorous, if extravagantly idealized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott's to regard the portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged erudition—as the study of a man "whom too much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... invasion of the rule already adopted, requiring secrecy, but in my opinion no possible harm can come from the daily publication of our debates. It is far better that true reports of these debates should be made, than that the distorted and perverted accounts which we see daily in the New York ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... countrymen. It is a war, as Winston Churchill has pointed out, against the military aristocracy of Germany, men who are six hundred years behind the times; who, to preserve their class against democracy, have perverted to the uses of warfare, to the destruction of life, every invention of modern times. These men are military mad. To our ideal of representative government their own idea is as far opposed as is martial law to the free speech of our ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... in New York City in 1895, when Roosevelt took control, was a monstrosity which, in almost every respect, did exactly the opposite from what the Police System is organized to do. Moral values had been so perverted that it took a strong man to hold fast to the rudimentary distinctions between Good and Evil. The Police existed, in theory, to protect the lives and property of respectable citizens; to catch ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... It will be a dangerous, a most dangerous experiment to hold these institutions subject to the rise and fall of popular parties, and the fluctuations of political opinions. If the franchise may be at any time taken away, or impaired, the property also may be taken away, or its use perverted. Benefactors will have no certainty of effecting the object of their bounty; and learned men will be deterred from devoting themselves to the service of such institutions, from the precarious title of their offices. Colleges and halls will ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... like all others, is frequently perverted to evil and ignoble Purposes; so that we may account for many of the Excellencies and Follies of Life upon the same innate Principle, to wit, the Desire of being remarkable: For this, as it has been differently cultivated ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... could truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief, sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side of both, oh see the ruin I am, and hate ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce- Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter. The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wages of sin is death' (Rom 6:23). Now if death be the wages of sin, and that be true that Christ did die and not sin, either the course of justice is perverted, or else he died for our sins; there was 'no cause of death in him,' yet he died (Acts 13:28). He did no evil, guile was not found in his mouth, yet he received the wages of sin (1 Peter 2:22). Sin, therefore, though not of his own, was found upon him, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... From the time when honest John Lilburne wrangled successfully against Cromwell's judges, it began to assume a special sanctity in popular belief. Then we come to the Popish plots and the brutalities of Scroggs and Jeffreys, when the jury played a leading part, though often perverted by popular or judicial influence, and without any sound theory of evidence. The revolution of 1688 swept away the grosser abuses; the administration of justice became decorous and humane; a spirit of fair play showed itself; the laws ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... resided in a mansion not made with hands. It is, we repeat, to be for ever regretted that poor Joseph has not left his version of the affair. The Immaculate Conception might perhaps have been cleared up, and theology relieved of a half-obscene mystery, which has unfortunately perverted ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... bestowed on Clifford. Sir Thomas, he says, 'had greatly distinguished himself in the House of Commons. Of the members of the Cabal, he was the most respectable. For, with a fiery, imperious temper, he had a strong though a lamentably perverted sense of duty and honour.' Farther on he adds that Clifford 'alone of the five had any claim to be regarded as an honest man.' Sir Thomas started a scheme which was practically the origin of the National Debt. Several statesmen who enjoyed the King's favour greatly desired the Lord Treasurer's ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... and desire of M. Ferry and his friends are to prohibit ministers of religion from taking any part whatever in the education of the French people. Already the municipal council of Paris has undertaken to 'bowdlerise' the literature of the world in order to prevent the minds of the young from being perverted by coming into contact with the name of God. These good butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers of the Seine really believe, like certain more academical persons of higher social pretensions in England and America, that the ineffable simpletons and scoundrels who for ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... in the possibility of the re-creation of character. Speculative Ethics prescribes only what ought ideally to be done or avoided. It takes no account of the foes of the spiritual life; nor does it consider the remedy by which character, once it is perverted or destroyed, can be restored and transformed. Christian Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the question, By what power can a man achieve the right and do the good? It is not enough to postulate the inherent capacity of man. Experience of human nature shows that there ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... brought about, indeed, by intemperance and gluttony. He was faithful to his wives, so long as he lived with them; and, while he doted on them, listened to their advice. But few of his advisers dared tell him the truth; and Cranmer himself can never be exculpated from flattering his perverted conscience. No one had the courage to tell him he was dying but one of the nobles of the court. He died, in great agony, June, 1547, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, and the fifty-sixth of his age, and was buried, with great pomp, in St. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... acquire unprecedented dominion over every species of literature, over the minds of all ranks of people, and the education of the youth, without giving any alarm to the world. The lovers of wit and polite literature were caught by Voltaire; the men of science were perverted, and children corrupted in the first rudiments of learning, by D'Alembert and Diderot; stronger appetites were fed by the secret club of Baron Holbach; the imaginations of the higher orders were set dangerously afloat by Montesquieu; and the multitude of all ranks was ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... to contain many excellent features," said he, musingly. "Your laws have a splendid foundation of equality, and cannot be arbitrarily perverted and abused to shield wrong and injustice. I am astonished that, with this code of Frederick II. in your hand, you were not able to render harmless and silence forever all those seditious and revolutionary ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... craft he could do. And so she departed and left Merlin." The sympathy of Malory is not with the enchanter. In the Idylls, as finally published, Vivien is born on a battlefield of death, with a nature perverted, and an instinctive hatred of the good. Wherefore she leaves the Court of King Mark to make mischief in Camelot. She is, in fact, the ideal minx, a character not elsewhere ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... early work have also been preserved. Beyond the Sarthe is another fine Romanesque church, also a complete minster, the church of Notre-Dame-du-Pre. A fine hospital, the work of Henry the Second, is now perverted to some military purpose, and some military tomfoolery forbids examination, in marked contrast to the liberal spirit which allows free access to everything that the antiquary can wish to visit at Fontevrault and at Saumur. But the ecclesiastical remains ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... where men of all units met, came the daily crop of "furphies" or rumours. Some of these, it was suspected, were set going by the Intelligence Section of the General Staff, but many of them were the deliberate creation of a few people with a rather perverted sense of humour. Others developed from the chance remark of some individual speculating on what might be, or what he hoped would be. The "Anzac Liar," as the unknown person was designated, dealt with many subjects, from an advance ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... Matter and Conservation of Energy constitute the Law of Substance in Haeckels Monistic Philosophy, and the severest altruism will permit man to follow his highest self-interest in obedience to these laws. It is only a perverted and vicious self-interest that would tempt ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... Iago is one of the subtlest studies of intelligent depravity ever created by man. Ostensibly his motive is revenge; but in reality his wickedness seems due rather to a perverted mental activity, unbalanced by heart or conscience. As Napoleon enjoyed manoeuvring armies or Lasker studying chess, so {184} Iago enjoys the sense of his own mental power in handling his human pawns, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... bringing-up, the sunland of love, that valley of the earthly paradise, was closed to her forever. She cursed this world of hypocrisy and deception and all it contained—her friends and acquaintances and the memory of her father and mother, who unabashed, had perverted the pure, unsullied gaze of the child, directed its steps in the paths trodden by its degenerate forefathers, taught it to regard falsehood in ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... or piety, but liberty, law, peace, civilisation, learning, art, science, the gifts which he bought for men with His blood, have followed in its train: while the nations who have not received that message that God was their King, or having received it have forgotten it, or perverted it into a superstition and an hypocrisy, have in exactly that proportion fallen back into barbarism and bloodshed, slavery and misery. My friends, if this philosophy of history, this theory of human ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... that many unstable spirits wrested and perverted St. Paul in his words and doctrines, inasmuch as some things in his Epistles are hard to be understood,—as when he speaks in this way, "that no one is justified by works, but by faith alone;" so, too, "the law is given to make sin more gross;" ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... the most eminent personages, were seen in these hospitals, examining the patients; they assisted the helpless; they dressed the wounded. This did so much honour to the new religion, that Julian the Apostate introduced this custom among the pagans. But the best things are continually perverted. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... beauties of poetry, or a taste unimproved by the diligent study of the most perfect models; yet they are always acute, lucid, and original. That his judgment is often warped by a political bias can scarcely be doubted; but there is no good reason to suspect that it is ever perverted by malevolence or envy. The booksellers left it to him to name his price, which he modestly fixed at 200 guineas; though, as Mr. Malone says, 1000 or 1500 would have been readily given if he had asked it. As he proceeded, the work grew on his hands. In 1781 ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... daughter. He understands chemistry. He lives in the arcana of nature and reads her secrets. No foolish study of the heathen classics; no training after mediaeval fashion in one of our colleges, which are anachronisms, has perverted his taste. Here is the Emile worthy of my Emilia," he would say, much to the ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... remember that Empirical knowledge is but a perverted view of Truth. All the fleeting things of life are but dross: their apparent reality an illusion. Material life is but a projection from the Cause world into the Effect world. Man is but a reflection of a reality that ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... nations to Death," Wilfrid said to them. "You have depraved the earth, perverted the Word, prostituted justice. After devouring the grass of the fields you have killed the lambs of the fold. Do you think yourself justified because of your sores? I will warn my brethren who have ears to hear the Voice, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... Ragstroar, who said, "Don't you let the Company see you carryin' off their property. They'll rip you open as soon as look at you. You'll be took afore the Beak." Dave was not yet old enough to see what a very perverted view of legal process these words contained, but his blue eyes looked mistrustfully at the speaker as he watched him pass up the street towards the Wheatsheaf, swinging a yellow jug with ridges round its neck and a full ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... with much pleasure a collection of old ballads, to which I see, Sir, you have contributed with your usual benevolence. Continue this kindness to the public, and smile as I do, when the pains you take for them are misunderstood or perverted. Authors must content themselves with hoping that two or three Intelligent persons in an age will understand the merit of their writings, and those authors are bound in good breeding to Suppose that the public in general is enlightened. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... power of ye said Mr Fielding and his now wife ye Estate would not be managed to ye best advantage and their Education would not be taken care of and there would be a great hazard that ye children might be perverted to ye Romish Religion." Then follows an order in Chancery, under the same date, "that ye eldest son of ye Defend't. Fielding ... be continued at Eaton School where he now is and that ye rest of ye children be continued ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... from himself that God is one. Secondly, by means of that capacity man either is in the light of heaven, or he derives the generals of his thought therefrom; and it is a universal of the light of heaven that God is one. It is otherwise when man by that capacity has perverted the lower parts of his understanding; such a man indeed is endowed with that capacity, but by the twist given to these lower parts, he turns it contrariwise, and thereby ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the southern question is concerned, I feel that the President did right. The wisdom of his executive order as to office holders depends upon the construction given to it, and he is not responsible for a perverted construction not authorized by its words or terms. As to the resumption policy, the law is plain and mandatory, and, more than all, the law is right, and the Republican party might as well understand first ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... word "Deb" (brick) still survives in the Arabic Tob, and, perverted to the Iberian Adobe (Et-tob) it has travelled ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... to instances where the best intentions of the administrators have led them wrong; his whole narrative illustrates the perils that beset a Government necessarily pledged to moral and material reform, which finds its own principles perverted against its efforts, and its foremost opponents among the class that has been the first to profit by the benefits which that Government ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... the rights of corporation from below, from assuming the exclusive position of an aristocracy and making education and intelligence the means for caprice and despotism. Thus the administration of justice, whose object is the proper interest of all individuals, had at one time been perverted into an instrument of gain and despotism, owing to the fact that the knowledge of the law was hidden under a learned and foreign language, and the knowledge of legal procedure ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... to be right, I abandon nothing that I undertake; and I was willing also to shew, that, as I was not of a cast of mind to be deterred by prospects or retrospects of danger, so neither were my principles to be weakened by misfortune or perverted by disgust. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... unremitting, constant, perpetual, perennial. Contract, agreement, bargain, compact, covenant, stipulation. Copy, duplicate, counterpart, likeness, reproduction, replica, facsimile. Corrupt, depraved, perverted, vitiated. Costly, expensive, dear. Coterie, clique, cabal, circle, set, faction, party. Critical, judicial, impartial, carping, caviling, captious, censorious. Crooked, awry, askew. Cross, fretful, peevish, petulant, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... ("To their perverted taste," he went on,) everything one may have lawfully is held cheap and the appetite, tickled only by forbidden indulgences, delights in what is ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... when she set her face in this direction, she was on the lookout for everything unfavorable; and everything, pretty nearly, was turned into something unfavorable, so perverted and distorted had her vision become. It was "Dora, did you notice this?" and "Amy, did you see that?" until the two began to find the incessant harping upon one subject rather wearisome, especially as the particular details thus pointed out had never yet developed into ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... Apostle says: "If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory." It must, however, be understood that their ignorance did not excuse them from crime, because it was, as it were, affected ignorance. For they saw manifest signs of His Godhead; yet they perverted them out of hatred and envy of Christ; neither would they believe His words, whereby He avowed that He was the Son of God. Hence He Himself says of them (John 15:22): "If I had not come, and spoken to them, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... rotten spot that will soon be cut out if things come about logically; it isn't the fault of the system. There never was any great movement in developing a new country that didn't have a quota of damned rascals to eliminate from within itself. If you didn't have such a perverted idea of independence, you'd see that I'm in no danger of losing either my identity or my self-respect simply because I've become a unit in a body of six hundred fighting-men. I don't intend to remain ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... enclosure he viewed a monstrosity that in some way resembled a human. Every reptile, every insect, every queer, misshapen animal not only looked human in some shocking manner, but also seemed to possess human characteristics. It seemed as though some demented creator with a perverted sense of humor had attempted to mock man by calling forth ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... a man to tell the people beforehand honestly what he will do, if they buy and use his poison, than it is to go on and do it? And what if they are not aware of the mischief which he is doing them, and he can accomplish it through their own perverted and voluntary agency? Is it not equally abominable, if he knows it, and does ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... have handled them too freely, or removed them from place to place! Swine, and sometimes the more gentle race of dogs and cats, are guilty of this horrid and preposterous murder. When I hear now and then of an abandoned mother that destroys her offspring, I am not so much amazed, since reason perverted, and the bad passions let loose, are capable of any enormity; but why the parental feelings of brutes, that usually flow in one most uniform tenor should sometimes be so extravagantly diverted, I leave to abler philosophers than ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... proceeded from the dwarfish sorcerer already mentioned, who boasted himself a devil incarnate. The slander spread fast and far. Their friends looked at them askance; their enemies clamored for their lives. Some said that they concealed in their houses a corpse, which infected the country,—a perverted notion, derived from some half-instructed neophyte, concerning the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Others ascribed the evil to a serpent, others to a spotted frog, others to a demon which the priests were supposed ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... royal highness's mind is perverted. The honors of the kingdom of France are being paid to your wife and you ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... humour is essentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He is not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. It is the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are people who pretend ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... can we speak of this? As if an express could go to Natchez or the mouth of the Cumberland and return in five weeks, to do which has never taken less than twelve!... But all the principles of law are to be perverted which would bear on the favorite offenders who endeavor to overturn this odious republic!... All this, however, will work well. The nation will judge both the offender and judges for themselves.... ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... believed, at least, in idealism. Nevertheless, so far as the average individual is concerned, with just his share and no more of the race-tendency, this idealism has been suppressed, and in some measure perverted. It is this which ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation. Then, too, facts may be perverted, circumstances may be made to bear a meaning that does not really belong to them, and fear and torture may force the weak to say anything that they are required. And, finally, the evidence and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... virtues. Human in its mechanism, it has been human in its infirmities. In the doctrine of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, which are the essential principles of Christianity, lies the redemption of mankind. But some of the churchmen have misconceived Christ, or perverted him to their own base purposes. He who drove the money-changers out of the temple, and denounced the aristocrats of his country as whited sepulchres, and preached a communism of goods, would not view to-day with patience or equanimity the dreadful sufferings ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly |
