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More "Perversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compulsory service to fiction; that these novels and plays might have been better literature if the authors did not study life in order that they might be better able to preach. Wells and Galsworthy also have suffered from suppressed idealism, although it would be unfair to say that perversion was the result. So have our muck-rakers, who, very characteristically, exhibit the disorder in a more complex and a much more serious form, since to a distortion of facts they have often enough added hypocrisy and commercialism. It is part of the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... were redeemable and redeemed at the bank counters. The article in the Constitution of 1787, prohibiting the issue of bills of credit by the States, was evidently intended to secure a uniform currency to the people of the United States, and it has been by a strange perversion of this manifest intention that the power has been conceded to the States to charter corporations to do that which was forbidden to themselves in their sovereign capacity; namely, to issue bills of credit, which bank-notes are. It is idle ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... bloodshed. We have there subverted the whole order of nature; we have aggravated every natural barbarity, and furnished to every man motives for committing, under the name of trade, acts of perpetual hostility and perfidy against his neighbour. Thus had the perversion of British commerce carried misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe. False to the very principles of trade, unmindful of our duty, what almost irreparable mischief had we done to that continent! We had obtained as yet only so much knowledge ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... and physical likes and dislikes, is, as I have elsewhere said, perverted by the fall. I will not say that our moral, intellectual and physical tastes are perverted in an equal degree; for I do not think so. Still there is a perversion, greater or less, of the whole man—in all his functions, faculties and affections. As a general rule, when left to our own course, we choose that food, for body, mind and soul, which, though it may be pleasant at first, is bitter ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... is seen when we know the possibilities of its transformation and sublimation, a matter which will be treated later.] Now if the libido symbol raised up for an ideal is placed too nakedly before the seeker, the danger of misunderstanding and perversion is always present. For he is misled by his instincts to take the symbol verbally, that is, in its original, baser sense and to act accordingly. So all religions are degenerate in which one chooses as a libido symbol the unconcealed sexual ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... to the atrocities committed on priests and women and children, to the murders of the Lusitania,—all deeds of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now reappeared, after centuries, under an intellectual and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous perversion of religious sanction. They reacted also, it might be, to their own sense of personal danger from an unprotected frontier dividing them from this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some thousands of Italians condemned to live under Austrian rule and fight her battles against ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... of the fact that the senses are the greatest source of information to the child's mind, the method of teaching by means of objects has arisen. Rightly used, there is great value in this mode of instruction, but a serious perversion of its legitimate use has developed in connection with religious instruction of little children. Though the discussion of this may be a possible digression, it seems necessary in order to safeguard ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... crucible of his spirit and give them forth as a significant and harmonious whole. The "poetry" of Goethe's autobiography—by far the best of autobiographies in the German language—must not be taken to imply concealment, perversion, substitution, or anything of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a moment to the Assunta. The enlargement of dimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent group of the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. It carries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable, without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublime beauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rank with the finest of those in ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... growth: build walls around the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are strong only in proportion ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Luther, declares: "The Small Lutheran Catechism can be read and spoken throughout with a praying heart; in short, it can be prayed. This can be said of no other catechism. It contains the most definitive doctrine, resisting every perversion, and still it is not polemical—it exhales the purest air of peace. In it is expressed the manliest and most developed knowledge, and yet it admits of the most blissful contemplation the soul may wish for. It is a confession ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the guest whom she wishes to honor. And sometimes, when stooping over them, she rubs them gently with her loosely-flowing hair—not as a substitute for a towel, but as a token of kindly welcome. This privilege belongs to the oldest daughter of the family; and the custom once liable to perversion, now shines with new beauty, as the expression of Christian love. He who once accepted the service in his own person, will hereafter say, to many a daughter of Chaldea, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor, he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims: ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... to discover the marvellous fund of material for the story-teller buried in the Oriental mine; and he had in a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more captivating than culture or scholarship. Hence his delightful version (or perversion) became one of the world's classics and at once made Sheherazade and Dinarzarde, Haroun Alraschid, the Calendars and a host of other personages as familiar to the home reader as Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... moral as well as intellectual supremacy, which acknowledges an outward world distinct from Him, and which represents Him as causing the changes in that universe by the acts of an intelligent volition, can only by a strange perversion of language ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... that you are different from others only in what is not so much worth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures, it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quite your own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion of what came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and had nothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any difference between you and your fellow-creatures; but only a seeming difference that flatters and ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... there is so little dispraise of individuals, such an absence of what can be characterized as depreciation either in the way of direct remark or of insinuation. There will be no call for contradiction of any slurs upon character through perversion of facts or the repetition of hearsay calumny in its pages. Nor does this seem to proceed from either a mere distaste for the chatter of gossips or an unwillingness to wound the feelings of survivors, though both these traits are discernible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... It has defiled every mountain and stained every plain, it has polluted the waters of every lake and river, and has reddened the very ocean. Murder's bloody hand, nerved by all the worst passions of man, has struck down, not only the guilty, but also the innocent, the weak and helpless. It is a perversion of the Creator's intention regarding mankind. He made men to dwell in peace and happiness. He put the solitary in families that each member might contribute to the well-being of the whole. Every man is his brother's keeper. He is expected to do him good and not harm. If my brother ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... and to help, that the family is organized. In this great human family of ours the man and the woman in days that are coming will cooperate to remove from our midst the blackest and most fearful perversion of the natural powers of our race. We do not believe in sitting down idly before this problem and saying, "It has always been, it always will be." In this great day of moral and spiritual progress, with powers that we have inherited from our forefathers ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... man—and a woman—and the Ultramontanes held the reins of government. While one would have been enough, they professed to have two grievances. One was the "political poison" of the Liberal opposition; and the other was the "moral perversion" of the King. In March matters came to a crisis. A number of University professors, headed by the rigid Lasaulx, held an indignation meeting in support of the Ultramontane Cabinet and "their efforts to espouse the cause of good morals." This activity ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... "That depends upon perversion. In the present instance it is turned to bad account. The young lady is admirably adapted to the stage, and if she would adopt that profession the very faculty of approbativeness would be her most powerful stimulus in ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... "thrown in" as a makeweight in the trade for the town is not impossible; but that Smith combined with Powhatan to kill Captain West is doubtless West's perversion of the offer of the Indians to fight on ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... went on compounding this cup of entertainment for himself and his hearers, smacking his lips over it, and all the more, Fleda thought, when they made wry faces; throwing in a little truth, a good deal of fallacy, a great deal of perversion and misrepresentation; while Mrs. Evelyn listened and smiled, and half parried and half assented to his positions; and Fleda sat impatiently drumming upon her elbow with the fingers of her other hand, in the sheer necessity of giving some expression ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... kirk of Scotland, nor was altogether content with their declaration published at Sanquhar, there was yet one clause which, to my spirit, impoverished of all hope, was as food and raiment; and that there may be no perversion concerning the same in after times, I shall here set down the words of the clause, and the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... of Mullinahone I witnessed the daily painful sight of the perversion of the labour of this country to the most profitless ends. Roads, which are now more than ever necessary to be kept in order, are in the course of obstruction, whilst waterlogged lands, reclaimable bottoms, and mountain slopes stand out in damning evidence of the indolence, neglect, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... of superior spiced-beef, which flattered their palates more than the cold remnants they had formerly been contented with. Every housewife who had once "bought at Freely's" felt a secret joy when she detected a similar perversion in her neighbour's practice, and soon only two or three old- fashioned mistresses of families held out in the protest against the growing demoralization, saying to their neighbours who came to sup with them, "I can't offer you Freely's ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... Alexander's disgraceful cruelty to its brave defender—and made of this a regular Chanson de Geste (in all but "Family" connection), the Fuerres de Gadres, a poem of several thousand lines. But the most generally popular (though sometimes squabbled over) parts of the story, were the supposed perversion of Olympias, not by the God Ammon but by the magician-king Nectanabus personating the God and becoming thereby father of the Hero; the Indian and some other real campaigns (the actual conquest of Persia was very slightly treated), and, far above all, the pure Oriental wonder-tales ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... limited, and we are outside it. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e., robbery; the commanders in the army pride themselves on victories, i.e., murder; and those in high places vaunt their power, i.e., violence? We do not see the perversion in the views of life held by these people, only because the circle formed by them is more extensive, and we ourselves are moving inside ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... personal advantage to his own realm of Sicily. Though a vassal of Beatrix of Provence, the Sire de Porceles was no devoted admirer of her husband, Charles of Anjou, and spoke with no concealment of the unhappy perversion of the Crusade. Charles of Anjou was all-powerful with the court of Rome, and in crusading matters Louis deemed it right absolutely to surrender to the ecclesiastical power all that judgment which ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as you describe it, it is shocking," said the President'. "The manhandling of the women by the police was outrageous and the entire trial (before a judge of your own appointment) was a perversion of justice," I said. This seemed to annoy the President and he replied with asperity, "Why do you come to me in this indignant fashion for things which have been done by the police officials ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... personality of God is all-essential for the satisfaction of our religious cravings, as a presupposition of trust, love, prayer, obedience, and such relationships; as bringing out the transcendence in contrast with the all-pervading immanence of the deity; as checking the pantheistic perversion of this latter truth by which, in turn, its own deistic perversion is checked. God is not only in and through all things; but also outside and above all things; just as Christ is not only the soul of the Church, but also its Head and Ruler. Between these two compensating ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... excluded from admission into the Order, for the evident reason that the former from an absence, and the latter from a perversion of the intellectual faculties, are incapable of comprehending the objects, or of assuming the responsibilities and obligations of ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... useful to man:—the tame, which will not breed, and the domestic which will breed in domestication. From certain singular facts we might have supposed that the non-breeding of animals was owing to some perversion of instinct. But we meet with exactly the same class of facts in plants: I do not refer to the large number of cases where the climate does not permit the seed or fruit to ripen, but where the flowers do not "set," owing to some imperfection of the ovule or pollen. The latter, which alone ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... political society for the protection of liberty and the promotion of the general welfare, sometimes becomes, as in Russia, a grinding despotism despoiling the many for the enrichment of the few. Thus, in our American politics, we have the machine, which is simply the perversion of party organization, and which in many instances has become, under the manipulation of greedy and conscienceless men, an ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... no one acquainted with current discussions will deny; the fact is indubitable. It is reviewed in the following pages with the constructive purpose of redeeming the idea of supernatural Religion from pernicious perversion, and of exhibiting it in its true spiritual significance. The once highly reputed calculations made to show how the earth's diurnal revolution could be imperceptibly stopped for Joshua's convenience, and the contention that the ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... her. He was a man, and he had looked at Kitty Tailleur, and his sympathies, like Mr. Lucy's, had suffered an abominable perversion. His judgment, like Mr. Lucy's, had surrendered to the horrible charm. She said to herself bitterly, that she could not compete ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... and gradually recovering from this perversion of opinion. The Emancipation Proclamation was probably issued as soon, or nearly as soon, as the Northern sentiment was prepared to give it even a moral support. Another term had to expire to accustom the same public mind to appropriate the spirit of that document as matter of earnest; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... thought to stimulate it by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries. Of physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the centre of the earth. In the matter of chemistry it had been practically demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... maintaining the character she had assumed and sustained during two years and a half was fully carried out by the skill and cleverness of her pretended correspondence; and in reading over these piles of letters, so full of originality, one could not but feel regret at the perversion of powers so remarkable,—powers which might have been developed by healthy action into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... right of my neighbor. That such is the case at this time—that legislatures are manipulated in the interest of a few, and that the great mass of the people feel only the burdens placed upon them by their servants, who are more properly speaking become their masters—that to such perversion of popular sovereignty we have come, is ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... of strange beauty, almost unearthly, and that yields to the unspeakable tenderness of the naive phrase at the words, "Quia Jehovah sustentat me." The Te Deum was until recently known only by Dr. Boyce's perversion. Dr. Boyce is reputed to have been an estimable moral character, and it is to be hoped he was, for that is the best we can say of him. He was a dunderheaded worshipper and imitator of Handel. Thinking that Purcell had tried to write in the Handelian bow-wow, and for want of learning had not ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... seems to have been selected to make up a cause of war with Great Britain, by the warlike proceedings of the President before communicating with the British Government on the subject. The American people had nothing but a complete perversion of the facts of the case ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... in relation to the action of "Ginistrella"; and yet, though they had made a sharp impression on the author of that work, like almost all spoken words from the same source, he a week after the conversation I have noted left England for a long absence and full of brave intentions. It is not a perversion of the truth to pronounce that encounter the direct cause of his departure. If the oral utterance of the eminent writer had the privilege of moving him deeply it was especially on his turning it over at leisure, hours and days later, that it appeared to yield him ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... my departure from the city the first of the horrific head-hunting crimes was committed and the actual drama got under way. I can recall reading the sensational accounts in the newspapers and my anxious fear that this fresh display of criminal perversion would excite Carse into a state nearing hysteria. I telegraphed him that same day, begging his refusal to bother with the case and requesting that he come to visit me. His reply was swift and brief; he had already commenced his investigations ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... capable of conceiving goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw "Othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. He rips her to pieces before us—he would have bedeviled ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... and other abstractions, it is of great importance in the case of physical beings and realities: for the properties of things are not understood so long as their essences are unknown. (6) If the latter be passed over, there is necessarily a perversion of the succession of ideas which should reflect the succession of nature, and we go far ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... his Royal Charter;" and with attempting to overthrow the rights of the colony under the charter by bringing in a military force to overawe and suppress the civil authorities. They denounced them as guilty of a perversion of their trust, and as having committed a breach upon the dignity of the crown, by pursuing a course "derogatory to His Majesty's authority here established," and "repugnant to His Majesty's princely and gracious intention in betrusting them with such a commission." The Court ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Cough Syrup.—Put 1 quart hoarhound to 1 quart water, and boil it down to a pint; add two or three sticks of licorice and a tablespoonful of essence of lemon. The Cause of the Disease Called "Hives," also Its Cure.—The trouble is caused by a perversion of the digestive functions, accompanied by a disturbance of the circulation. It is not attended with danger, and is of importance only from the annoyance which it causes. Relief may be obtained in most instances by the use of cream tartar daily to such extent as to move the bowels slightly. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... smell the offensiveness of the bowel-excreta which came away every day on using the gravitation-enema, and which were horrible to by-standers. It would seem from this as if his distress at the bad smell of his breath was probably due to a perversion of the sense of smell, which can be easily understood if we reflect that the disease-process was going on in the region where the smell-apparatus is specially located. The temperature was 96.2 degrees that ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... often fails. We may also attribute to the disturbance of the sexual functions the frequent occurrence of that monstrous instinct which leads the mother to devour her own offspring,—a mysterious case of perversion, as it ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... in the Republic, that 'God is the author of evil only with a view to good,' and that 'they were the better for being punished.' Still his doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments may be compared favourably with that perversion of Christian doctrine which makes the everlasting punishment of human beings depend on a brief moment of time, or even on the accident of an accident. And he has escaped the difficulty which has often ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... effect of the pathetic treatment is far more dangerous than that of the frivolous. A good many well-meaning reformers do not see that, because they know too little of the deeper layers of the sexual imagination. The intimate connection between sexuality and cruelty, perversion and viciousness, may produce much more injurious results in the mind of the average man when he sees the tragedy of the white slave than when he laughs at the farce of the chorus girl. Moreover, even the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... some must oppose whatever they themselves do not originate;—and, others again, have no doubt been led honestly to entertain a distrust which has finally grown into an opposition, through the influence of misrepresentations, or from a perversion of facts by those whose interests, from some cause, are at ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... bred in the same traditions, so invariably and incurably devoted to baseness and hypocrisy? Was the nature of a priest absolutely devoid of what physicians call recuperative force, restoring him to a sound mind, in spite of professional perversion? In fine, if man had been so grossly enslaved in moral nature from the beginning of the world down to the year 1789 or thereabouts, how was it possible that notwithstanding the admitted slowness of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... place writes: "Magic is nothing but the perversion of order; it is especially the abuse of correspondences."(2) A study of the ceremonial magic of the Middle Ages and the following century or two certainly justifies SWEDENBORG in writing of magic as something ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... to say the least, the grievances of the Socialists are greatly—one might almost say grotesquely—exaggerated, and that they are largely founded on a perversion of facts; a perversion which can be easily explained by the desire of the Socialist leaders to arouse the blind passions of the discontented wage-earners in accordance with Gronlund's advice, quoted ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... "golden quality," nor does a million dollars in bank epitomize its character. Its language is not spoken in the dialect of Wall Street or of wheat pits. Gold, grain, stocks, and bonds and estates too often mean the perversion of those qualities most valuable to human life. Realty is not the prime issue of life, but reality. If that which a man gets in his pay envelope, however lucrative that may be, constituted his only reward, his ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... edifices are the chosen theatres of this display; it would seem rather to be in the infusion, by a more worthy education, of ideas which would enable woman to wield religion, morality, and common sense against this burdensome perversion of her love ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... publishers, and for the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of money plays an inordinate role in the man's life, and keeps on playing a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he doubtlessly inherited through his ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... utterly vanishes. Philosophy wishes to discover the substantial purport, the real side of the divine idea, and to justify the so much despised reality of things; for Reason is the comprehension of the divine work. But as to what concerns the perversion, corruption, and ruin of religious, ethical, and moral purposes and states of society generally, it must be affirmed that, in their essence, these are infinite and eternal, but that the forms they assume may be of a limited order, and consequently may belong to the domain of mere nature and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... was the son of that Dudley, minister to Henry VII., who, having, by rapine, extortion, and perversion of law, incurred the hatred of the public, had been sacrificed to popular animosity in the beginning of the subsequent reign. The late king, sensible of the iniquity, at least illegality, of the sentence, had afterwards restored young Dudley's blood by act of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... professions, thus wasting many an excellent handicraftsman. Mercenary considerations, tempting men to pursue money-making occupations for which they were unfit, instead of less remunerative employments for which they were fit, were responsible for another vast perversion of talent. All these things now are changed. Equal education and opportunity must needs bring to light whatever aptitudes a man has, and neither social prejudices nor mercenary considerations hamper him in the choice of his ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... most bloodthirsty fire-eaters I met during the war were among the fighting men. Of course there were plenty of them at home too, and plenty of peaceable and civilised people at the front, but it's the most absurd perversion of facts to make out that all our combatants were full of sweet reasonableness (any one who knows anything about the psychological effects of fighting will know that this is improbable), and all our non-combatants ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... are owing to the perversion or abuse of propensities originally good; and perseverance, when carried too far, or expended upon unworthy objects, becomes ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... a penniless infant? He resolved, therefore, to send his child from his roof to some place where, if reared humbly, it might at least be brought up in the right faith,—some place which might defy the search and be beyond the perversion of the unbelieving mother. He looked round, and discovered no instrument for his purpose that seemed so ready as Walter Ardworth; for by this time he had thoroughly excited the pity and touched the heart of that good-natured, easy man. His representations of the misconduct of Lucretia were ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... because I would make his fall the greater, and deepen the wound I meant to inflict upon his mother. From this night I shall pursue a different course; from this night his ruin may be dated. He is in the care of those who will not leave the task assigned to them—the utter perversion of his principles—half-finished. And when I have steeped him to the lips in vice and depravity; when I have led him to the commission of every crime; when there is neither retreat nor advance for him; when he has plundered ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and consummated by Gould was in its day denounced as one of the most disgraceful events in American history. To adjudge it so was a typical exaggeration and perversion of a society caring only about what was passing in its upper spheres. The spectacular nature of this episode, and the ruin it wrought in the ranks of the money dealers and of the traders, caused its importance to ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... portion of the neighbourhood! What a pernicious engine for the gratification of pride, scandal, envy, and malice! What an inquisition of the few bad by which to torment the many good! What a dagger in the hands of tolerated assassins! In short, what a perversion of reason, what a disease in the very bosom of society, what a lurking demon stationed at the threshold of every happy family, to blast and thwart the modest ambition of its amiable members! Doubtless, in and near Wandsworth, a mistaken constitution in the system of ballot renders ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... which was made to screen mankind from the excesses of power: such a claim, I will venture to say, is a monster that never existed, except in the wild imagination of some theorist. It cannot be admitted, because it is a perversion of the fundamental principle, that every power given for the protection of the people below should be responsible to the power above. It is to suppose that the people shall have no laws with regard to him, yet, when he comes to ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... day. He might have learnt how in this mixed constitution the people still retained their inalienable rights, how they elected, ratified, and above all how they punished.[306] He might have gathered that the identification of the tribunate with the interests of the nobility was a perversion of its true and vital function: that the tribune exists but to assist the commons and can be subject to no authority but the people's will, whether expressed directly by them or indirectly through his colleagues.[307] ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... expression. This difference may proceed along two lines. It may be aberration from normal human nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect or to a thousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversion approaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathological and may be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development of normal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form of inward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things, in mental power ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... close observer. Still it was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the nature of the case and my own PARTI-PRIS, read even with a certain violence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. The study indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page), Thoreau's sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men, I please myself with thinking, of less temper and ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... event, which came up as a topic of conversation at the dinner-table, was, naturally enough, the occasion of some satisfaction to the host. Various views as to the psychology of conversion or, according to one's point of view, perversion, were mooted. Various possible motives, spiritual and temporal, underlying such a change, were discussed. Eventually the host asked ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... and celibacy unquestionably impresses the character of women more deeply than that of man. Additional evidence of the greater sexual activity of man is furnished by the overwhelmingly large proportion of the various forms of sexual perversion reported by psychiatrists in the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... capital beauties were borrowed from his favourite Euripides; which, indeed, cannot escape the observation of those who read with attention his Phaedra and Andromache. The pompous and truly Roman sentiments of Corneille are chiefly drawn from Luoan and Tacitus; the former of whom, by a strange perversion of taste, he is known to have preferred to Virgil. His diction is not so pure and mellifluous, his characters not so various and just, nor his plots so regular, so interesting, and simple, as those of his pathetic rival. It is by this ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... revolutions but her own, looked with horror on the turmoil in France and, misled by Burke and the nobles of the realm, forced the two nations into war. Even Pitt saw a blessing in this at first; because the sudden zeal for fighting a foreign nation—which by some horrible perversion is generally called patriotism—might turn men's thoughts from their own to their neighbors' affairs, and so prevent ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... reaches Israel. Here it rests, gathers blackness, and thunders long and loud. The reign of Jeroboam II was one of much outward prosperity. 2 Kings 14:25-28. The vices which Amos rebukes are those which belong to such a period—avarice, violence, oppression of the poor, perversion of justice, luxury, lewdness—all these joined with the idolatrous worship established by Jeroboam the son of Nebat. For such multiplied transgressions God will cause the sun to go down at noon, and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... all this is that each yuga, or era, has its fixed character. Rather than that the men of a yuga should impart their character to the age in which they live, the age itself has a pronounced moral bent which is transferred to all who happen to live under it. Thus we see in the theory a perversion and contradiction of the facts; for an ethical character is assigned to days and hours rather than to moral beings, who alone ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... The miserable fate of Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; the trial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of the Duke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities of the king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king's chief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the Scotch Dissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and noble Duke of Argyle,—are described with graphic power unknown ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order—of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or, in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste. Next, he is a member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly, he is a member of his family. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... from the Romans we got its name. The old name for it was noep, nep, or neps, which was only the English form of the Latin napus, while Turnip is the corruption of terrae napus, but when the first syllable was added I do not know. There is a curious perversion in the name, for our Turnip is botanically Brassica rapa, while the Rape is Brassica napus, so that the English and Latin have changed places, the Napus becoming a Rape and the Rapa ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... with closed eyes during the third act, wondering whether he should believe the critics in the flesh, or their criticisms in the columns of their respective journals, he saw rehearsed before him a new operatic perversion of MACBETH, as unlike the original as even VERDI'S MACBETTO, and quite as inexplicable to the unsophisticated mind. And this is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... carrying out the Union were extremely simple. A scale of "compensation" was arranged—a word which could, by a slight perversion of the ordinary meaning of the English language, be used as a new form of expressing what was formerly called bribery. Every one was promised everything that he wished for, if he would only consent to the measure. The Catholics were to have emancipation, the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... elective and deposable war-chief (Teuchtli), the power to elect and to depose being held by a fixed constituency ever present, and ready to act when occasion required. The Aztec organization stood plainly before the Spaniards as a confederacy of Indian tribes. Nothing but the grossest perversion of obvious facts could have enabled Spanish writers to fabricate the Aztec monarchy out of a ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... as perhaps supporting the contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling, that Ashe had been a clergyman. An attentiveness to the woman's pleasure remains, in itself, very far from a perversion, but increases, as Colin Scott has pointed out, with civilization, while its absence—the indifference to the partner's pleasure—is a perversion of the most ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and Cicero affects to believe the tale, that Cimber was not without guilt in the death of his brother. Vergil is, of course, not greatly concerned in deriding Atticism itself: to this school Vergil must have felt less aversion than to Antony's flowery style; it is the perversion of the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... dutiful, in military officers, to treat the orders of their commander-in-chief as we do the command of our Master; or in mercantile agents, to interpret thus loosely the instructions of their employers? The perversion, however, has become so familiar to us, that we are insensible of it; and the fact may be numbered among other wonders of a like kind, which the experience of a few past years has exhibited. A few years since, good men were in the use of intoxicating drinks without dreaming ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... now, tell me the charm in those feet which you young ladies designated, I remember, as 'teensy,' and expressed your desire to 'tiss.' Shocking perversion of the king's English—and in honor of nothing but two dirty little feet!" ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... the foundations of a fallen world, and a sea below the seas on which men sail. Seas move like clouds and fishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land. And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death of abominable things. I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride; such things are hideous not because they are distant but because they are near to us; in all our brains, certainly in mine, were ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... community for the sake of advantage; the expedient to all is the just. In the large society of the state, there are many inferior societies for business, and for pleasure: friendship starts up in all (IX.). There are three forms of Civil Government, with a characteristic declension or perversion of each:—Monarchy passing into Despotism; Aristocracy into Oligarchy; Timocracy (based on wealth) into Democracy; parent and child typifies the first; husband and wife the second; brothers the third ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... rapid to the point of astonishment, was by no means easy. Rather was it violent and remorseless—a driving as by reiterated blows, a rude merciless dragging onward and downward. Yet even so, for all the anguish and shame—as of unseemly exposure—the perversion of her intention and action, the scorn so ruthlessly poured upon her, it was less of herself, the compelled, than of Richard, the compelling, that she thought. For even while his anger thus drove and dragged her, he himself was tortured in the flame far below,—so ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... meeting in congress to condemn "conscription" and at the same time sanctioning the most extreme measures of illegal persecution to drive non-Unionists into the ranks of their own organizations. It is a monstrous and intolerable perversion of all sound political principles. The whole sorry business is a flagrant example of the subtle way in which a democracy can ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... election a minority may often elect a President, and when this happens it may reasonably be expected that efforts will be made on the part of the majority to rectify this injurious operation of their institutions. But although no evil of this character should result from such a perversion of the first principle of our system—that the majority is to govern—it must be very certain that a President elected by a minority can not enjoy the confidence necessary to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... habitual. Suitable surroundings and treatment would here consist of the presence of good models and high ideals, sympathetic help in resisting temptation, and not in a harsh denunciation of each unapproved act as evidence of turpitude and perversion. You need not assume that there is perversion until that is demonstrated beyond any doubt. For, if the child is morally redeemable, he should be treated like one who is weak and who needs help until the difficulties are mastered; otherwise you are likely to encourage in him the feeling ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... its Nature, it will be found to be a spasmodico-flatulent Disorder of the Primae Viae, that is, of the Stomach and Intestines, arising from an Inversion or Perversion of their peristaltic Motion, and, by the mutual consent of the Parts, throwing the whole nervous System into irregular Motions, and disturbing the whole Oeconomy of the Functions.... no part or Function of the Body ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... correct judgment of passing affairs than must necessarily come from preconceived opinions. There is no management to work a conviction in his reader on this side or the other, still less any obvious perversion of fact. He evidently believes what he says, and this is the great point to be desired. We can make allowance for the natural influences of his position. Were he more impartial than this, the critic of the present day, by making allowance for ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... other law than his innate love of what is handsome and fair, and his native aversion to what is ugly and foul; that is, he owns no restraint but as he is inwardly held to apply either or both of them in such a way as to avoid all distortion or perversion from what is naturally graceful and pleasant. For everybody, I take it, knows that in the intoxications of a life of sensuous love reason and conscience have as little force as they have in a life of dreams. And so the Poet fitly ascribes to Oberon and his ministers both Cupid's ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and Destruction hath no covering.... The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at His rebuke. ... The thunder of His power who can understand?" That all this is some of the world's great poetry does not in the least alter the fact that it is an abasement of the soul, an hysterical perversion of the facts of life, and a preparation of the mind for the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... that marriage been her dearest wish for years? Why then should she feel this strange gladness at the impossibility of its fulfilment? Altogether, Alma feared that her condition of mind and morals must be sadly askew. Perhaps, she thought mournfully, this perversion of proper feeling was her punishment for the deception she had practised. She had deliberately done evil that good might come, and now the very imaginations of her heart were stained by that evil. Alma cried herself to sleep many a night in her repentance, but she kept on writing to Gilbert, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Miss Monflathers, 'that it's very naughty and unfeminine, and a perversion of the properties wisely and benignantly transmitted to us, with expansive powers to be roused from their dormant state through ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the safety of the people is the supreme law, might, by a similar perversion, be claimed by any mob or party constituting the majority of a city, town, or neighbourhood, as well as by the Colony of Massachusetts, against the Parliament or supreme authority of the nation. They had no doubt of their own infallibility; they had no fear ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... very considerable allowance for his period and his circumstances, not disposed to think him so much a renegado and deliberate knave as a fickle, needy, and childish changeling, in the matter of his "perversion" to Popery; although we yield to none in admiration of the varied, highly-cultured, masculine, and magnificent forces of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... gullible almost to sublimity, uncritical even for an eminently uncritical age, accepting and retailing any and every monstrous invention, the more readily apparently in proportion to its monstrosity. For all that—despite his prejudices, despite even his often deliberate perversion of the truth, it is difficult to avoid a certain kindliness for him. To the literary student he is indeed a captivating figure. With his half-Welsh, half-Norman blood; with the nimble, excitable, distinctly Celtic vein constantly discernible in him; with a love ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even Francisci was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel. This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naive pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... similarity of symptoms, both constitutional and local, between the cow-pox and the disease received from morbid matter generated by a horse, the common people in this neighbourhood, when infected with this disease, through a strange perversion of terms, frequently call it the cow-pox. Let us suppose, then, such a malady to appear among some of the servants at a farm, and at the same time that the cow-pox were to break out among the cattle; and ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... retraced the origin and progress of the insurrection, let them determine whether it has not been fomented by combinations of men, who—careless of consequences and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion—have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... horrible perversion of manliness! Nothing can account for such inhumanity but the sanguinary madness of the Revolution which has tainted a whole generation," mused the returned emigre in a low tone. "Who is your adversary?" ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the Friends, but natural and common to almost all sects,—the perversion of the wisdom of the first establishers of their sect into their own folly, by not distinguishing between the conditionally right and the permanently and essentially so. For example: It was right conditionally in the Apostles to forbid black puddings even to the Gentile ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... 'a pleasant grove for their wits to walk in' amidst rows of beautifully bound, and intrinsically precious, volumes. They feel it delectable, 'from the loop-holes of such a retreat,' to peep at the multifarious pursuits of their brethren; and while they discover some busied in a perversion of book-taste, and others preferring the short-lived pleasures of sensual gratifications—which must 'not be named' among good bibliomaniacs—they can sit comfortably by their fire-sides; and, pointing to a well-furnished library, say to their ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... aerial globules in rapid and expansive movement; boys can produce them with suds and a tobacco-pipe in rapid succession, each, for aught we know, containing a "granule" that multiplies by "fissiporous generation." But these are not organic globules, and the author has committed the great perversion in language or logic of confounding the organic globule of life with the inorganic globule of a chemist. His theory is more fanciful than that of LAMARCK, from whom it is derived, and who had, at least, his petit ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... more than ever, the whole of Stephen Arnold, all that was so openly the Mission's and all that was so evidently God's. It will be seen that she felt in no way compelled to advise him of this, her backsliding. I doubt whether such a perversion of her magnificent course of action ever occurred to her. It was magnificent, for it entailed a high disregarding stroke; it implied a sublime confidence of what the end would be, a capacity to wait ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... not properly belong to the subject. The divine mind contemplates sin in its principle; and the least transgression, being a resistance of his command, an insult to his authority, an opposition to his truth, a violation, of general order, a perversion and misuse of the noblest faculties, whatever may be the force of the attack or the nature of the temptation, is infinitely offensive to the blessed God. It is an admission of that principle which, could it possibly prevail, would produce eternal discord, universal rebellion, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... and it is possible that, after all, reason and reflection produce a result not dissimilar from what we call by that name. For what does a woman mean by it but perversion of feeling through calculation? Passion is vicious when it reasons, admirable only when it springs from the heart and spends itself in sublime impulses that set at naught all selfish considerations. Sooner or later, dear one, you too will say, "Yes! dissimulation is the necessary armor ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... stud, hunk. one-night stand. pornography, porn, porno; hardcore pornography, softcore pornography; pin-up, cheesecake; beefcake; Playboy[magazines with sexual photos], Esquire, Hustler. [unorthodox sexual activity] perversion, deviation, sexual abnormality; fetish, fetishism; homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality; sodomy, buggery; pederasty; sadism. masochism, sado-masochism; incest. V. mate, copulate; make love, have intercourse, fornicate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic—envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... took a turn in the room. I was—naturally, I think—a little irritated by his way of putting it. A man assuming to know more about love than a woman! Was there ever such a monstrous perversion of the truth as that? ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... here the beginning of that tendency of the Neoplatonic school to find a sanction for all their theories in some perversion of the plain meaning ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... settlements. In this policy she was backed by the sagacity and strength of her mate, under whose wide-arched skull was a clear perception of the truth that man is the one master animal. But the hybrid whelps, by some perversion of inherited instinct, hated man savagely, and had less dread of him than either of their parents. More than once was the authority of the leaders sharply strained to prevent a disastrous attack ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... have learnt how in this mixed constitution the people still retained their inalienable rights, how they elected, ratified, and above all how they punished.[306] He might have gathered that the identification of the tribunate with the interests of the nobility was a perversion of its true and vital function: that the tribune exists but to assist the commons and can be subject to no authority but the people's will, whether expressed directly by them or indirectly through his colleagues.[307] The history of the Punic wars did indeed reveal, in the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... and deposable war-chief (Teuchtli), the power to elect and to depose being held by a fixed constituency ever present, and ready to act when occasion required. The Aztec organization stood plainly before the Spaniards as a confederacy of Indian tribes. Nothing but the grossest perversion of obvious facts could have enabled Spanish writers to fabricate the Aztec monarchy out of a ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... when in the sight of God and all the world they shall blush with shame before a young child who has lived according to this commandment, and shall have to confess that with their whole life they are not worthy to give it a drink of water? And it serves them right for their devilish perversion in treading God's commandment under foot that they must vainly torment themselves with works of their own device, and, in addition, have scorn and loss for their ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... own lot. All widows were wards of the Crown; and it was not at all usual for the Crown to concern its august self respecting their wishes, unless they bought leave to comply with them at a very costly price. By a singular perversion of justice, the tax upon a widow who purchased permission to remarry or not, at her pleasure, was far heavier than the fine exacted from a man who married a ward of the Crown without royal licence. The ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... natural products as the private property of a limited number of families be morally justified? In its origin was it attained by violence and robbery? Else, has it grown up by gradual and cunning perversion of law? These three questions point at the principle of landowning. Another question rises: Is it good for a nation for the great majority to retain life only on condition that there is someone ready to pay wages ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order; that's the 'Service of God,' not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms when you are merry, and to pray when you need anything; and, by the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying and psalm-singing are 'service.' If a child finds itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks its father for it—does it call that, doing its father a service? If it begs for a toy or a piece of cake—does it call that serving its father? ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... which this doctrine falls short of the doctrine of Christ I pointed out as the principal one the absence of any commandment of non-resistance to evil by force. The perversion of Christ's teaching by the teaching of the Church is more clearly apparent in this than in ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... the artist."—P. 275. If Reynolds was sparing of his wine, the word "plenty" was most inappropriate. Even the remark of Dunning, Lord Ashburton, is perverted from its evident meaning, and as explained by Northcote, and the perversion casts a slur upon Sir Joshua's guests; yet is it well known who they were. "Well, Sir Joshua," he said, "and who have you got to dine with you to-day?—the last time I dined in your house, the company was of such a sort, that by ——, I believe all the rest of the world enjoyed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... most singular perversion I have ever witnessed. Mrs. Logan, I entertain strong suspicions that the prisoner, or her agents, have made some agreement with you on this matter to prevent the ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... as soon as I receive the order," said I; "and as soon as I reach another state I will print the history of this shameful perversion of justice." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls around the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... mean to go through your correspondent's letter, otherwise "I could hardly reprehend in sufficiently strong terms" (and all that sort of thing) the perversion of what I said about Giordano Bruno. But "ex uno disce omnes"—I ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... expulsion from the Methodist New Connexion. This work, like my other works, was written in the clearest and simplest style, so that no man with ordinary abilities could fail to understand it, and no man without powers of perversion bordering on the miraculous, could give to any part of it an objectionable meaning. This book he took, and read, and misread, and interpreted, and misinterpreted, so as to make the impression on persons unacquainted ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... freedom. Similarly, we have the amazing spectacle of Trade Unionists meeting in congress to condemn "conscription" and at the same time sanctioning the most extreme measures of illegal persecution to drive non-Unionists into the ranks of their own organizations. It is a monstrous and intolerable perversion of all sound political principles. The whole sorry business is a flagrant example of the subtle way in which a democracy can be cajoled, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... exceedingly ludicrous. Strange as it may seem too, there is undoubtedly a degree of protection in the wig and gown - a dismissal of individual responsibility in dressing for the part - which encourages that insolent bearing and language, and that gross perversion of the office of a pleader for The Truth, so frequent in our courts of law. Still, I cannot help doubting whether America, in her desire to shake off the absurdities and abuses of the old system, may not have gone too far into the opposite extreme; ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... whither his father took him and a volume of sermons, in the first year of the reign of King James; and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years of his scholastic and collegiate life. Thus there was less danger to Tom of a perversion of his faith by the Director, who scarce ever saw him, than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the Vicar's company; but as long as Harry's religion was his Majesty's, and my lord's, and my lady's, the Doctor said ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... their maturity, they were smitten with any blight. In the Wanderer, we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father, there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Shakespearean plays. Here we find, if Will wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the modern world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the ancient world; but the English author's eyes are dimmed by the mists and dust of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of Troy. The work of perversion began, we know, in the eighth century before our era, when, by the author of the Cypria, these favourite heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were represented as ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... know enough about his limitations to know what he can not do. If Mr. Howells should pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should receive the statement courteously; but I should know it for a—well, for a perversion. If the late Josh Billings should rise up and tell me that he wrote Herbert Spencer's philosophies; I should answer and say that the spelling casts a doubt upon his claim. If the late Jonathan Edwards should rise up and tell ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... social and economic development played by "The Forgotten Man." The misappropriation of this title and its application to a character the exact opposite of the one for whom Sumner invented the phrase is, unfortunately, but typical of the perversion of words and phrases indulged in by our present-day "liberals" in their attempt to further their revolution by diverting the loyalties of individualists to collectivist ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... her part of mystifier, had opened to his enraptured sight a magic window through which she had shown him a charming vision of possible happiness; but while he was still gazing, she had closed it abruptly in his face, laughing scornfully at his discomfiture. What sense was there in this perversion of justice, this perpetual mockery of Fate? At times the influence of his early education would resume its sway, and he would ask himself whether all this apparent contradiction were not a secret admonition from on high, warning ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... this very passage our Lord is explaining the sense of Holy Writ; therefore, its true meaning is not left to the private interpretation of every chance reader. It is, therefore, a grave perversion of the sacred text to adduce these words in vindication of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... so long as human nature remains as it is prostitution will continue, therefore it is better that it should be regulated with a view to controlling the spread of disease. It is also urged that the system acts as a safeguard against sexual perversion by providing an outlet for the unrestricted appetites of men; that in its absence clandestine prostitution increases, and innocent girls are more likely to be led astray or become the victims of sexual ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... could be given this extension of meaning is seen when we know the possibilities of its transformation and sublimation, a matter which will be treated later.] Now if the libido symbol raised up for an ideal is placed too nakedly before the seeker, the danger of misunderstanding and perversion is always present. For he is misled by his instincts to take the symbol verbally, that is, in its original, baser sense and to act accordingly. So all religions are degenerate in which one chooses as a libido symbol the unconcealed sexual act, and therefore ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... religious and decent manner he will please to direct, at the earliest possible time, the consecration of the bucklers; and according to the answer the people shall act." With this befooling they completed the perversion of a mind which even before was not so strong or sound as ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... some one people, country, or race. A dialect is a special mode of speaking a language peculiar to some locality or class, not recognized as in accordance with the best usage; a barbarism is a perversion of a language by ignorant foreigners, or some usage akin to that. Idiom refers to the construction of phrases and sentences, and the way of forming or using words; it is the peculiar mold in which each language ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... all, whether they stand up for Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty Frenchman, "wicked overmuch." "To us youths," says Goethe, in his Autobiography, "with our German love of truth and nature, the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects, became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion and the sacred books for the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... related the discussion to the queen mother.[974] The traitor's report, doubtless grossly exaggerated, is supposed to have decided Catharine to prompt action. It is certain, at least, that the calumnious perversion of the speeches and resolutions of the Huguenot conference was employed to inflame the passions of the mob, as well as to justify the atrocities of the morrow in the ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... cherish, and instruct her offspring, what can be expected of that Man's heart and understanding who has continually (from Childhood to Maturity) beheld so pernicious an Example? His nearest relation is the first person he is taught to revere as his Guide and Instructor; the perversion of Temper before him leads to a corruption of his own, and when that is depraved, vice quickly becomes habitual, and, though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... sworn obedience to His Majesty's authority according to the Constitution of his Royal Charter;" and with attempting to overthrow the rights of the colony under the charter by bringing in a military force to overawe and suppress the civil authorities. They denounced them as guilty of a perversion of their trust, and as having committed a breach upon the dignity of the crown, by pursuing a course "derogatory to His Majesty's authority here established," and "repugnant to His Majesty's princely ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... elements not believed to be transubstantiated, 222 Profane excluded from the Eucharist, ib. Cases of discipline decided by Church rulers, 223 Case of the Corinthian fornicator, ib. Share of the people in Church discipline, 226 Significance of excommunication in the apostolic Church, 228 Perversion of excommunication by ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... something gross and prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development and perversion. But the grossness of dances devised by the secular mind for purposes of aesthetic pleasure is all in the censorious critic, who deserves the same kind of rebuke administered by Dr. Johnson to Boswell, who asked the Doctor if ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... else, and that you are different from others only in what is not so much worth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures, it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quite your own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion of what came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and had nothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any difference between you and your fellow-creatures; but only ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... appropriate what was meant for the Cloth only! Whoso would avoid falsehood, which is the essence of all Sin, will perhaps see good to take a different course. That reverence which cannot act without obstruction and perversion when the Clothes are full, may have free course when they are empty. Even as, for Hindoo Worshippers, the Pagoda is not less sacred than the God; so do I too worship the hollow cloth Garment with equal fervour, as when it contained the Man: nay, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... drew into his shell a little, giving the merest sketch of what had happened. But he listened closely while these two practical old friends supplied him with information in the gossiping way that human nature loves. No doubt there was much embroidery, and more perversion, exaggeration too, but the account evidently rested upon some basis of solid foundation for all that. Smoke ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... willing to count him amiable, ready to make very considerable allowance for his period and his circumstances, not disposed to think him so much a renegado and deliberate knave as a fickle, needy, and childish changeling, in the matter of his "perversion" to Popery; although we yield to none in admiration of the varied, highly-cultured, masculine, and magnificent forces ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... been utilized to give strength to the type of government and social conditions which the ruling class desired to have perpetuated. This has been the evident purpose in Japan (R. 334), though the government of Imperial Germany formed perhaps the best illustration of such perversion. This was seen and pointed out long ago by Horace Mann (R. 281). There the idea of nationality through education (R. 342) was carried to such an extreme as made the government oppressive to subject peoples ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Court seems, particularly in cases where the conspiracy has economic ends, to be applying its doctrines with increasing severity. While I consider criminal conspiracy a dragnet device capable of perversion into an instrument of injustice in the hands of a partisan or complacent judiciary, it has an established place in our system of law, and no reason appears for applying it only to concerted action claimed to disturb interstate ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... beyond that any of a gentleman's perquisites. That much of his early success had been due to this heroic upbringing, Adrian was too honest not to admit, but then—by God, it had been hard! All the colour of youth! No time to dream—except sorely! Some warping, some perversion! A gasping, heart-breaking knowledge that you could not possibly keep up with the people with whom, paradoxically enough, you were supposed to spend your leisure hours. Here was the making of a radical. And yet, despite all this, Adrian dined with ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... with a start. By some strange perversion of the fate that delights in torturing lovers, the features of the immodestly clothed amazon bore the most startling resemblance to that paragon of celestial purity, Miss ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... thought at least they would spare the works of God, the most sacred symbols of divine revelation to suffering humanity. But yesterday there occurred in this city a performance which for shameless insolence and blasphemous perversion exceeds anything but the wildest flight of a devil's imagination, and reveals the bosses of the Labor Trust as wanton defilers of everything that decent ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... by the wall awhile and watched; the sorrow of it all sank into us. There in the holiest place of all, according to their thinking, close to the emblems of deity, they had set this grievous perversion of the holy and the pure. Right on the topmost pinnacle of everything known as religious there they had enthroned it, and robed it in starlight and crowned it as queens are crowned. "Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!" "One thing have ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... is no longer the duty of a privy councillor to seize the suspected volumes of an antiquarian, or plunder the papers of an ex-chief justice, whilst lying on his death-bed. Government licensers of the press are gone, whose infamous perversion of the writings of other lawyers will cause no future Hale to leave behind him orders expressly prohibiting the posthumous publication of his legal MSS., lest the sanctity of his name should be abused, to the destruction of those laws, of which he had been long the venerable and living image. An ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... and for all, secret societies have not always been formed for evil purposes. On the contrary, many have arisen from the highest aspirations of the human mind—the desire for a knowledge of eternal verities. The evil arising from such systems has usually consisted in the perversion of principles that once were pure and holy. If I do not insist further on this point, it is because a vast literature has already been devoted to the subject, so that it need only be touched on ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... misconstrue this passage. They want the term "to bless" to mean "to praise." They want the passage to read: In thee shall all the nations of the earth be praised. But this is a perversion of the words of Holy Writ. With the words "Abraham believed" Paul describes a spiritual Abraham, renewed by faith and regenerated by the Holy Ghost, that he should be the spiritual father of many nations. In that way all the Gentiles could be given ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... Pantheism is that perversion of reason and language which denies God's personality, and calls some imaginary soul of the world, or the world itself, by his name. While Pantheists are fully agreed upon the propriety of getting rid of a ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of a different kind in Kokleku. In the former province, nature is the agent of this perversion; here the law is the agent. The ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... "Boccaccio. Strange perversion! A pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants for him to satisfy than hell had, all which he fed to repletion; but let us rather look to ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... greater equality of condition, and with a hidebound and unnecessarily sensitive attitude of mind in respect to the rights of property. One count that looms large in the wide range of the indictment against our judicial system is the immoral part that lawyers are said necessarily to play in the perversion of justice by making the worse appear the better reason. Such a public agitation and such an issue in politics lead to a consideration of the fundamental reasons for the existence of our profession ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... this view, but put the emphasis in the sentence: Luther became a monk, at a different place. In the Protestant view the mistake is this, that Luther became a monk, in the Catholic view, it is this, that Luther became a monk. Protestants regard monasticism largely as a perversion of the laws of nature and of Christian morals. In an institution of this kind Luther could not find the relief he sought. His mistake was that he sought it there. Catholics view monkery as the highest ideal of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... be greater if it were dissociated from attempts at perversion," submitted Mitri with a show of ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... those interests which we have in common with the rest of humankind. Much as we deplore the wanton destruction of property, much as we bewail the reckless loss of life, we mourn especially the diminution of ethical standards and the perversion of our whole outlook on life. For this means the lapse of much for which our own teachers have stood, the forfeit of many a principle which has been dear to the Jewish heart. Let me touch lightly upon three points out of the many that ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Galilee,' as they sat at the birthday banquet. Probability, natural feeling, the obvious requirements of the narrative, History itself—, for Josephus expressly informs us that 'Salome,' not 'Herodias,' was the name of Herodias' daughter[49],—all reclaim loudly against such a perversion of the truth. But what ought to be in itself conclusive, what in fact settles the question, is the testimony of the MSS.,—of which only seven ([Symbol: Aleph]BDL[Symbol: Delta] with two cursive copies) can be found to exhibit this strange mistake. Accordingly ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... church, at that time, was not only shown in its perversion of some of the most obvious principles of morality, but in the discouragement of all free inquiry in its disciples, whom it instructed to rely implicitly in matters of conscience on their spiritual advisers. The artful institution of the tribunal of confession, established with this view, brought, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... and soon afterwards (1563) pub. the work on which his fame rests, the English version of the Acts and Monuments, better known as The Book Martyrs. Received with great favour by the Protestants, it was, and has always been, charged by the Roman Catholics with gross and wilful perversion of facts. The truth of the matter appears to be that while Foxe was not, as in the circumstances he could hardly have been, free from party spirit or from some degree of error as to facts, he did not intentionally ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... convey to the reader an idea of the entire perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people, by describing the public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption—an offence which was punished with death until quite recently. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... in cases where men are become the slaves of habit, and do a thing because they are got into the way of doing it, though they allow that it is a sad and sorry way, and leads them wide of true happiness. These instances show perversion of the normal ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... hopeful generalities which were not true, and of rhetorical phrases that could easily be misapprehended, appeared to sustain the suggestion that he did not realise the critical juncture of affairs. But the assertion that he predicted the "war will be over in sixty days" was a ridiculous perversion of his words. No war existed at that time, and his "sixty suns" plainly referred to the sixty days that must elapse before Lincoln's inauguration. Nevertheless, the "sixty days prediction," as it was called, was repeated and believed for ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... powers of the woman to lead and to help, that the family is organized. In this great human family of ours the man and the woman in days that are coming will cooperate to remove from our midst the blackest and most fearful perversion of the natural powers of our race. We do not believe in sitting down idly before this problem and saying, "It has always been, it always will be." In this great day of moral and spiritual progress, with powers that we have inherited from our forefathers in this ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... do for him during the coming interview. He selected a high-backed cane-seat chair from those around the writing table, and as he had already twice said, "Good morning, Mrs. Chester," and "I am very glad to meet you"—the last being a wicked perversion of his real emotions—he waited for the party of the second part to open the ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... to aim all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic—envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the backbiter, the petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life—their standard ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... show with what absurd perversion the forms and technicalities of law are applied to obstruct the purposes of justice, which they were designed to further, may find excellent examples in England. But leaving this allow me to ask whether you think all the ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... here with a few questions, the clear and prompt replies to which enabled Harley to detect Levy's plausible perversion of the facts; and he vaguely guessed the cause of the usurer's falsehood, in the criminal passion which the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indeed, occasioned Glooskap so much trouble by absences that he took wolves in their place. The ravens of the Edda are probably of biblical origin. But it is a most extraordinary coincidence that the Indians have a corresponding perversion of Scripture, for they say that Glooskap, when he was in the ark, that is as Noah, sent out a white dove, which returned to him colored black, and became a raven. This is not, however, related ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... righteousness which, thank God, are still alive among us. "My dear," he says, "you are the incarnation of morality, your conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names." Similar, and no less unfortunate, is his perversion of that instinct of patriotism which, however mistaken in some of its expressions, has yet proved its moral and practical worth during many a century of British history. There is the less need to dwell upon this, because those who discard patriotism have only to state their case clearly ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... females—consciousness of prowess for its own sake, and the display of it in order to intimidate the enemy, arise. Into this motive of war there enter all the antagonisms that come from self-consciousness, the whole force of the diathesis of developing sexuality, with its jealousy and cruelty, and tendencies to perversion. The force of this motive of prowess must at some period of development have become very great. It extends out into a love of combat for its own sake, reenforces other motives, and issues in the more abstract motives of honor and power that we see ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... steal for the mere sake of stealing. The morbid craving for excitement which is at the bottom of so many motiveless and useless crimes, again and again has driven apparently sensible men and women to ruin and even to suicide. It is a form of emotional insanity, not loss of control of the will, but perversion of the will. Some are models in their lucid intervals, but when the mania is on them they cannot resist. The very act of taking constitutes the pleasure, not possession. One must take into consideration many things, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... from the House; he was carried to Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end. His last battle was at least heroic. If his stroke was struck on the wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life. He could not bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to make such observations without repelling them." The caution of the chief justice was extremely gratifying to the colony. The arrest went to the foundation of personal freedom, and assumed a power capable of great error and perversion. ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... was clear to her. He was a man, and he had looked at Kitty Tailleur, and his sympathies, like Mr. Lucy's, had suffered an abominable perversion. His judgment, like Mr. Lucy's, had surrendered to the horrible charm. She said to herself bitterly, that she could not compete ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... United States have been the complacent victims of a system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their private lives were model citizens. But they have suffered from a curious moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to do for themselves. Fortunately for us all that delusion is ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... is sad to contemplate such a perversion of a really excellent brain. They have power, even as you have, and they have the will to destroy, which is a thing that I cannot understand. However, if it is graven upon the Sphere that we are to pass, it means only that upon the next plane we shall continue ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the above report is correct, as far as it goes. Some five hundred diggers were present. Now for the perversion from the reporter of 'The Argus', Melbourne, Tuesday, ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... is closely allied in its species to the Globe Artichoke, and the Jerusalom Artichoke (girasole), so named from turning vers le soleil, or au soleil, this being corrupted to "Jerusalem," and its soup by further perversion to "Palestine" soup. The original Moorish ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... stages of his disorder (if the term may be fitly applied to a case which was not a perversion of the faculties, but their decay) he could still converse at times with much of his old liveliness and energy. When the mind was, as it were, set going upon some familiar subject, for a little time you could not perceive much failure; but if the thread was broken, if it was a conversation ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... said that most men grieve over the smallest mistake more bitterly than over the greatest sin. This is decidedly a perversion of the moral nature; nevertheless, there is a good ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... two cases the ultimate object was not a low one, it was one which was supposed to be for the benefit of humanity and of the dumb creation. But that does not justify the means. The maxim, "The end justifies the means," is the greatest perversion of truth, and still more so if this hidden power, the power of suggestion, is used to injure any one for a more personal motive than in these cases which I have cited. The lower the motive, the lower the action becomes, and to suppose that because ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... pay tribute, but those who are not under his sway and do not recognize him as their lord—so that they may all come into the knowledge of God and enter the bosom of the Church. Nor should this be accomplished in the manner hitherto employed employed—namely, by the perversion of all law, divine and human; by murders, robberies, captivities, conflagrations, and the depopulation of villages, estates, and houses. These wrongs are inflicted and perpetrated by those who, under pretext and in the name of preaching ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... this connection, which may be a perversion of Mr. Kipling's meaning, but not so far from it, after all. And yet, would the eagle attempt the great flights if contentment were on the plain? Find the mainspring of achievement, and you hold in your hand the secret of the world's mechanism. Some aver ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... are an insult, not only to the person but to all mankind? I am young, I grant, and know but little of the barbarity which it is pretended is universal. I cannot think the accusation true. Or, if it be, I am convinced it must be the result of some strange perversion of what may be called the natural propensities of man. I own I have seen children wrangle for and endeavour to purloin, or seize by force, each others apples and cherries; and this may be a beginning to future rapacity. But I know the obvious course of nature would be to correct, instead ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to the physical than to the spiritual influence of nature; in other words; if they had been purer naturists, as the Aztecs ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... No. 148, entitled 'The cruelty of parental tyranny,' Johnson, after noticing the oppression inflicted by the perversion of legal authority, says:—'Equally dangerous and equally detestable are the cruelties often exercised in private families, under the venerable sanction of parental authority.' He continues:—'Even though no consideration should be paid to the great law of social beings, by which every individual ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... to the Divine Being moral as well as intellectual supremacy, which acknowledges an outward world distinct from Him, and which represents Him as causing the changes in that universe by the acts of an intelligent volition, can only by a strange perversion of language be ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... romantic melancholy; and I like the white lucidity of classic statuary. I suppose the one taste is the offspring of temperament, the other of thought; for intellectually, I admire the Greek ideas, and was glad to hear you correct Sidney's perversion of the adjective. I wonder," she added, reflectively, "if one can worship the gods of the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Arianus', as one of the Fathers admits? Alas! alas! how long will it be ere Christians take the plain middle road between intolerance and indifference, by adopting the literal sense and Scriptural import of heresy, that is, wilful error, or belief originating in some perversion of the will; and of heretics, (for such there are, nay, even orthodox heretics), that is, men wilfully unconscious of their own wilfulness, in their limpet-like adhesion to ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... descent to hell, though rapid to the point of astonishment, was by no means easy. Rather was it violent and remorseless—a driving as by reiterated blows, a rude merciless dragging onward and downward. Yet even so, for all the anguish and shame—as of unseemly exposure—the perversion of her intention and action, the scorn so ruthlessly poured upon her, it was less of herself, the compelled, than of Richard, the compelling, that she thought. For even while his anger thus drove and dragged her, he himself was tortured in the flame ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... happened, there will be no possibility of a Reform which will lessen the needless expense and shorten the unjustifiable delay which our present system of legal procedure occasions; a system which gives to the rich immeasurable advantages over poor litigants; and amounts in many cases not only to a perversion of justice but to ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... responsible for everything and bending under the burden of its responsibilities, political convulsions, revolutions without end, ruins over which all forms of socialism and communism attempt to establish themselves; these are the evils which must necessarily flow from the perversion ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... The first two are simple enough and partially true, like the first thoughts of an intelligent youth; the third, which is a real contribution to ethical philosophy, is perverted by the ingenuity of Socrates, and hardly rescued by an equal perversion on the part of Critias. The remaining definitions have a higher aim, which is to introduce the element of knowledge, and at last to unite good and truth in a single science. But the time has not yet arrived for the realization of this vision of metaphysical philosophy; and such a science when brought ...
— Charmides • Plato
... and charity, being murdered by this nation, then pagan and barbarous. Since these Indians became acquainted with the true religion they have never been known to conform to any other, but have preserved their firmness in the faith up to the present day in spite of the danger of perversion to which they are so often exposed, more especially since they have lived among the English, and in spite of their ignorance, for it is difficult to teach them. Their language which they call "Mic-mac," is a jargon without rule. They have been taught to read in it, but only by means of hieroglyphics. ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates of its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad, deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made captivating through the beautiful. Iago and Edmund are poetical as parts of a whole; and when in speech ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Lohenstein of Gryphius, Besser of Flemming, Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even Francisci was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel. This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naive pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... and gullible almost to sublimity, uncritical even for an eminently uncritical age, accepting and retailing any and every monstrous invention, the more readily apparently in proportion to its monstrosity. For all that—despite his prejudices, despite even his often deliberate perversion of the truth, it is difficult to avoid a certain kindliness for him. To the literary student he is indeed a captivating figure. With his half-Welsh, half-Norman blood; with the nimble, excitable, distinctly ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... up frightened. The statement was an audacious perversion of the truth. But then Frank Lavender knew very well what his aunt meant by going into the open air every afternoon, wet or dry. At one certain hour her brougham was brought round: she got into it, and had both doors and windows hermetically ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may leave behind ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the defenceless sex, of the ministers of religion, and of the faithful adherents of a fallen monarch.' What! have you so little knowledge of the nature of man as to be ignorant that a time of revolution is not the season of true Liberty? Alas, the obstinacy and perversion of man is such that she is too often obliged to borrow the very arms of Despotism to overthrow him, and, in order to reign in peace, must establish herself by violence. She deplores such stern necessity, but the safety of the people, her supreme law, is her consolation. This apparent contradiction ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... some of the round-towered churches in Norfolk and Suffolk,[59] where the windows are formed with heads of this shape. Antiquaries, unwilling to admit that the flat-sided arch, as it has been called by a perversion of terms, was introduced into England prior to the fourteenth century, have labored to prove that such windows were alterations of that period, contrary to the evidence of every part of ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... compounding this cup of entertainment for himself and his hearers, smacking his lips over it, and all the more, Fleda thought, when they made wry faces; throwing in a little truth, a good deal of fallacy, a great deal of perversion and misrepresentation; while Mrs. Evelyn listened and smiled, and half parried and half assented to his positions; and Fleda sat impatiently drumming upon her elbow with the fingers of her other hand, in the sheer necessity of giving some expression to her feelings. Mr. Stackpole at last got his ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... functions—excesses of this or that kind; and no one questions the accepted belief that insanity is inheritable. Is it alleged that the insanity which is inheritable is that which spontaneously arises, and that the insanity which follows some chronic perversion of functions is not inheritable? This does not seem a very reasonable allegation; and until some warrant for it is forthcoming, we may fairly assume that there is here a further support for belief in the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... though he may clothe it with pretexts and the false forms of marriage, he will have only permissible debauchery, he will know only the same immoral life in which I fell and caused my wife to fall, a life which we call the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear and laughter in our society. How many, ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... the world by what they do. Their words, which reveal what they are thinking and how they are thinking, give almost the only vision of their minds; and "by their words ye shall know them" becomes not a perversion, but an adaptation of the old text. Would you judge of a boy just graduated entirely by the acts he had performed in college? If you did, you would make ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
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