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More "Perversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time, or the acquittal that gave the lie to his slanderers in after years. The events occurred forty years ago—the story was only half known then, and like all such stories formed the basis for every kind of exaggeration and perversion.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Herd's version knew the English, and altered at pleasure, or the Englishman knew a Scots version, and altered at pleasure. The perversion is of ancient standing, undeniably. But when Scott's original text exhibits the same phenomena of perversion, in a part of the ballad missing in Herd's brief lay, Colonel Elliot supposes that NOW the exchanges are by a modern ballad- forger, shall we say Sir Walter? ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... friends, that even those who wished to express to her their gratitude for the good they had received from her books were constrained to be silent. "While," says her publisher, "she was very sensitive to any criticism based on a misconception or a perversion of her purpose, never, in all my intercourse with her, did I discover the slightest evidence of a spirit of literary ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... publication of "A Scriptural View of Woman's Rights and Duties," clearly demonstrating the equality of man and woman in the creation, as well as the independent, self-reliant characteristics sanctioned in woman, by the examples of the sex given in the Bible. As woman has ever been degraded by the perversion of the religious element of her nature, the scriptural arguments were among the earliest presentations of the question. When opponents were logically cornered on every other side, they uniformly fell back on the decrees of Heaven. The ignorance of women in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... perversion! Since the playing of those melancholy minor strains in that red sunset so long ago, which had touched so responsive a chord in Laurelia's grief-worn heart, the crazy old fiddle had been naturalized, as it were, and had exchanged its domicile under the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 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 also a religion must degenerate, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... misery and suffering, but the world in itself is really a perfect work of Divine wisdom and goodness. "The root of evil is not in the nature of the world, but in moral wrong—in a desertion from God." Sin and wickedness arise from the misuse and perversion of things which are not in themselves evil. Christianity calls for a break from the wickedness of the world. It calls upon man to give up his sin, to deny, or break with, the evil of which he is guilty. But it does not expect man to do this in his own strength alone—God ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... 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 justice, the difference ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which, if good, would have been let alone—a clever device of throwing dust into our eyes. Another produces what appears to be a pencil drawing, and a very good imitation some of them are, but at best a deception. To make something look like something else is a perversion of a brilliant discovery in photographic processes, which offers the means for securing unity (and in this word lies every principle of composition) by adding to or ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... 'Foiled was perversion by that youthful mind, Which flattery fooled not, baseness could not blind, Deceit infect not, nor contagion soil, Indulgence weaken, or example spoil, Nor mastered science tempt her to look down On humbler talent with a pitying frown, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... crime. He is rewarded by a cure as miraculous as was his harm; recovers his fortune, and marries the maiden. A later termination separates them again; but this is simply the folly and bad taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion of mediaeval sentiment, the crowning instance of which is found in Guy of Warwick. Hartmann himself was no such simpleton; and (with only an infinitesimal change of a famous sentence) we may be sure that as he was a good lover so he made a ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... conscience of 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 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
... polygamy and suicide; for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to the husband or his parents; for the same reason that they serve their temples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that they sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual perversion. They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men with traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the gestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are in hundreds of other ways; and I ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... and Spencer in the Cabinet. Lord Granville came in finally, and said in his sweetest manner (which is a very disagreeable one) that he had vast experience, and had "never known a man stand on his extreme rights and gain by it." This I felt to be a monstrous perversion of the case, and I was glad on the morning of the 9th to find that my reasons were very fairly stated in the Standard, the Telegraph, and the Daily News. Chamberlain had seen Escott of the Standard, and Lawson ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... somewhat confused, "it is perhaps the essence of perversion that a person feels compelled to hoodwink people by doing things and making statements the very reverse of what is natural and what is to be expected. Miss Burns, I wish, I heartily wish, you would look out a little for that poor creature drifting about ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Americanism. The last two chapters, on "Frenzied Liberty" and "The Myth of a 'Rich Man's War,'" should be called to the especial attention of the persons who, not daring to be openly treasonable, try to serve Germany by advancing the cause of Bolshevism in this country, and by downright and shameless perversion of the truth as to the part played by the men of means in this war. The chapter on "Frenzied Liberty" is an acute and fearless exposition of the damage done to liberty by the men here who are trying to play the part ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... the whole Narrative is such a Misrepresentation of Facts, such a Perversion of Truth, as you will, I am perswaded, agree, as soon as you have perused the Papers I now inclose to you, that I hope you or some other well-disposed Person, will communicate these Papers to the Publick, that this little Jade may not impose ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... 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 ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... 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 ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... disgusting and degrading thing I ever heard talked about on a man o' war was the perversion of the sex instinct—the unnatural use of it! This, too, is a joke and laughed at and talked lightly about; but the records of the British Navy, and I think of other navies, would reveal something along this ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... the hair upon the arm, L'Etoile has been obviously disingenuous. M. Beauvais, not being an idiot, could never have urged, in identification of the corpse, simply hair upon its arm. No arm is without hair. The generality of the expression of L'Etoile is a mere perversion of the witness' phraseology. He must have spoken of some peculiarity in this hair. It must have been a peculiarity of color, of quantity, of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ruins body and soul, destroying the former by hunger and the latter by a terrified conscience. It makes of God the devil, and of the devil God. It makes hell of heaven and heaven of hell; righteousness of sin, and sin of righteousness. This I call perversion—where strictest justice is the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry. They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion, conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thousands of young men from industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren negative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress upon the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the perversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability and refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... a Queen and a subject, by those who never felt the existence of such a feeling as friendship, could only be considered in a criminal point of view. But by what perversion could suspicion frown upon the ties between two married women, both living in the greatest harmony with their respective husbands, especially when both became mothers and were so devoted to their offspring? This ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... the search for methods in the Reign of Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable perversion of a writer's meaning for an evanescent political object—and a very shabby object too—is enough to make one think that George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered himself of the saying that "Politics are a trade ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... writes like a partisan, and yet like an honest one, who is no further warped from a 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 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... by M. Paul Bert, as contained in a cable dispatch from Paris, is not only a perversion of facts, but a falsehood cut from whole cloth. I never certified, wrote, or said that dead hogs are shipped to packing-houses, or that these carcasses are shipped abroad. All I ever said in regard to transportation of diseased ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... in South Sea stock, by which, contrary to the custom of the adventure, he realized 100,000l. proves that the talent of making money, at least, had not deserted him. But it seems an idle as well as an uncalled for perversion of truth to contend, that from the date of his first attack he ever was the man he had been previously. If 'the tears of dotage' did not flow from his eyes, it is certain that much of the vigour of mind which once belonged to him was lost, and even his speech continued embarrassed in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... are just like every one 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 seeming difference that flatters and cheats you with a sense of your strangeness, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... in mere self-will, but to gain their freedom, the most precious possession of mankind. Remember, too, that to shew mercy is better than to shed blood; the sword killeth, but the favor of the ruler bringeth joy and happiness. Conclude the war as speedily as possible, for war is a perversion of nature; in peace the sons outlive the fathers, but in war the fathers live to mourn for their slain sons. Farewell, my young heroes, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... followed the big city's biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and cherished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbarity—the Hue and Cry. Nowhere but in the big cities does it survive, and here most of all, where the ultimate perfection of culture, citizenship and alleged superiority joins, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... 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 of its ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... This monstrous decision, a perversion of all law, natural and civil, filled the people with astonishment. Could the maker of the laws of Rome thus himself set them at defiance? They stood as if stunned, until Claudius approached to lay hands on the maiden, when the women and her friends gathered ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... father's Case, when he distinctly pronounced his opinion that it could end but in failure. Though a strict Constitutionalist, he had words of disgust for princes, acknowledging, however, that we were not practical in our use of them, and kept them for political purposes often to the perversion of our social laws and their natural dispositions. He spoke of his son's freak in joining the Navy. 'That was the princess's doing,' said Temple. 'She talked of our naval heroes, till she made me ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of Cervantes. But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition. My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Individual, child as, See also Freedom Infant Schools, early Infant Schools, formalism, causes, etc., Kindergarten system, perversion of, present-day schools, buildings, furniture, etc., change in spirit since the 'eighties, effect of child study movement, etc., curriculum, lack of clear aim and continuity, discipline, formalism, promotion and uniformity, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... 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 nurture ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... Kentucky, fill more than twenty-two pages—reserving a line or two of text at the top. To say nothing of the sentiments, such notes are a shameful abuse of the reputation and work of Mr. Wheaton, and a perversion of the duties and rights of an editor. But a word of the sentiments. He exhausts himself and the records of the past in accumulating precedents to condemn the policy of freeing slaves as a war measure, or of arming them in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... these doctrines exercise any influence for the perversion of public morals? Much; their influence is disastrous. And do the men who profess them believe them, taking the word 'believe' in its real and deep meaning? No; they often do mischief which they do not mean to do, and do ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... any such perversion or inaccuracy in the cautious course of reasoning which has assisted ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... nations in regard to belligerents. The Chesapeake 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 until ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... deceive. A mansion on a valuable corner lot does not constitute the "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 effort ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... doth my jealous mind connect these men with every perversion and corruption of Gospel truth. They are at this moment as well the plotting mind as the executing arm of the rotten Church of Rome. The spirit of Loyola would seem lately to have left Hades, to animate his followers upon earth. Be sure, Sir Christopher, that where error and mischief ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... of a dendroidal captivity flashed into Seymour's mind with the phrase, and stimulated his curiosity as to some quaint rural perversion ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... have been free in the nineteenth, for she had no power to choose her 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 natural result of this arrangement was that the ladies who were ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... Nothing else about her mattered—one knew her all when one knew that. She's indeed in one particular, I think, sole of her kind—a person whom vanity has had the odd effect of keeping positively safe and sound. This passion is supposed surely, for the most part, to be a principle of perversion and of injury, leading astray those who listen to it and landing them sooner or later in this or that complication; but it has landed her ladyship nowhere whatever—it has kept her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly in the same place. It has protected her from every ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... to him, "O dear my son,[FN122] there is no man can tell thee other but tints I have said, except he twist the words handed down to us of the Holy Law and turn the truths thereof from their evident meaning. And such a perversion is their saying that the Word hath inherent and positive power and I take refuge with Allah from such a mis-belief! Nay, the meaning of our saying that Allah (to whom belong Might and Majesty!) created the world with His Word ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... number of sexual offences has been the subject of frequent and serious judicial comment, especially in cases where young children were the victims, or the very serious nature of the charge connoted a perversion dangerous to the moral well-being of society; and, as the experience of the Board in dealing with prisoners of this class accords, as far as it goes, with the now generally accepted opinion that, with certain exceptions, persons committing unnatural offences labour under physical disease or disability, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... part of Spiritualists to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, concerning marvelous phenomena, it is extremely difficult to do so. Be it distinctly understood that we do not for an instant impute wilful perversion of the truth. All that we mean is that, for two reasons, it is likely that the marvels of Spiritualism will be, by believers in ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... other's absence in uncontrollable agony, the conditions are serious enough for the consultation of a physician. It is an abnormal state of affairs, and if probed thoroughly might be found to be a sort of perversion, a sex mania, needing immediate and perhaps ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... not surprising that temperance reformers appeal in vain on this question, and that their facts and arguments are viewed with plausible indifference, or insidious opposition, by persons whose appetites and instincts have been undergoing debasement, and perversion from the very dawn of their lives. My own deliberate conviction is that nothing but harm comes to nursing mothers, and to the infants who are dependent upon them, by the ordinary use of alcoholic beverages of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... reason may be mentioned for regarding a knowledge of the undifferentiated stage of the sexual impulse as of great importance. In works on the pathology of the sexual impulse we are frequently assured that in this or that specific instance the perversion was inborn, because perverse sensations have existed since the days of childhood. But the existence of the undifferentiated stage teaches us that we are not justified in inferring, from the mere fact of the primary occurrence of a "perverse" ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Britain is not disposed to redress our grievances after proper application, the people have nothing more to do, but to gird the sword on the thigh and shoulder the musket." Doubtless this report was a perversion of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... I entirely agree with you about "Martin Chuzzlewit." But the point seems to me that the preposterous perversion of truth and the ill-nature and malice of the book are of consequence chiefly as indicating Dickens' own character, about which I care not a rap; whereas, the characters in American shortcomings and vices and follies as ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... a wretched perversion of conscience to require of any man, condonation of the infamous cruelties and treacheries which have disgraced our foes during the last two years. The best elements in us rise in irrepressible repugnance before such pageants of wickedness as have clothed the famous name of Wittenberg ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... Smoothly and pleasantly Mr. Stackpole 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 to her feelings. Mr. Stackpole at last ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have tried and tried things. Isn't that the way one leaves the normal and gets into the byways of perversion? ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... worship a shade of hypocrisy, a practical deception: for how often does the Body 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 ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... be denied in words; or in works; or by a perversion of the gospel, causing it to become another gospel. We will treat ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... there were copies of letters to country-sheriffs ordering the release of convicted heretics and the imprisonment of their accusers; there were evidences of enormous bribes received by him for the perversion ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... attempt to represent that movement as artificial, the work of scheming capitalists or professional agitators, I regard it as a wilful perversion of the truth. The defenceless people who are clamouring for a redress of grievances are doing so at great personal risk. It is notorious that many capitalists regard political agitation with disfavour because of its effect ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... even our clothes go back on us when we are down. Weston I had always known as a lanky man, but about his loosely fitting garments there had been an air of careless distinction. Now that he was broken, they hung with such an odd perversion as to bring from its hiding-place every sharp angle in the thin frame. The best nine tailors living could not have clothed him better for that little journey, nor lessened a whit the pathos of the thin arms that lay limply across the shoulders ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... disapproved by the Commissioner of the General Land Office and the Secretary of the Interior. The successors of these officers oppose the present bill on the ground that in its operation it would open the door to fraud and to a perversion of the intentions of the Government in relation to the ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... me less than justice. All I wish to impress upon your mind is, that you are not in any way picked out by Providence to be specially unhappy—that there is no perversion of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... narrative, one finds that he has mental capacity of a high order. He was as mean a rascal as Noah Claypole: and yet he had a fine clear-seeing intellect. Now what does this gallows-bird tell us? Why, his whole argument is intended to prove that he was an ill-used victim of society! Such a perversion has probably never been quite equalled; but it remains there to show us how firmly my theory stands—that the real scoundrel never knows himself to be a scoundrel. Had Fury settled down in a back street and employed ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... hurry, but the sculptor was. He drummed on the table, he made angry faces at his neighbors—contented looking Germans who whistled themes from "Rheingold"—and when Herr Sammett saluted his guests with a crazy trombone and crazier perversion of the Donner motive, Arthmann jumped up and excused himself. The two hours and a half in the theatre had made him nervous, restless, and he went away saying that he would be back presently. Mrs. Fridolin was annoyed. It did not seem proper ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... discovering and teaching the truth, to the less appropriate work of determining how much of it comes within "the sphere of practical politics." Comte, indeed, by organizing them as an independent power apart from, and outside of, the State, would make such a perversion extremely probable. A hierarchy of priests, under a despotic Pope, would soon cease to be, in any sense, a spiritual power; and this would be only the more certain if, by the Comtist denunciation of specialism, they were prohibited from any division of labour according to capacity ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... language of Mrs. Jameson, "whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable and grave, whatever hath passion or admiration in the changes of fortune or the refluxes of feeling, whatever is pitiful in the weakness, grand in the strength, or terrible in the perversion of the human intellect," be the domain of tragedy, this correspondence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... joint debates of 1858, the latter accused Lincoln of having, when in Congress, voted against the appropriation for supplies to be sent the United States soldiers in Mexico. In reply, Lincoln said: "This is a perversion of the facts. I was opposed to the policy of the administration in declaring war against Mexico; but when war was declared I never failed to vote for the support of any proposition looking to the comfort of our poor fellows who were maintaining the dignity ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... forbade the satisfaction of their natural desires to all but a privileged few, and of the general visible coercion which came of those laws. All that cause of violent crime is gone. Again, many violent acts came from the artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which caused overweening jealousy and the like miseries. Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law-made idea) of the woman being the property of the man, whether he were husband, ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... aged, of the innocent, of 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. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... people of Italy, reacted to the crime against Belgium, 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 ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... all, it must needs possess a social character; this is founded not only in the nature of man, but still more in the nature of religion. You will acknowledge that it indicates a state of disease, a signal perversion of nature, when an individual wishes to shut up within himself anything which he has produced and elaborated by his own efforts. It is the disposition of man to reveal and to communicate whatever is in him, in the indispensable relations and mutual dependence not only of practical life, but ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... This maxim, that 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. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... seemed the surest way of gathering strength to denounce it; but behind me, all the while, I felt Mrs. Fontage's shuddering pride drawn up in a final effort of self-defense. I hated myself for my sentimental perversion of the situation. Reason argued that it was more cruel to deceive Mrs. Fontage than to tell her the truth; but that merely proved the inferiority of reason to instinct in situations involving any concession to ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... throat. "We mustn't let the babies pay the penalty of their parents' sins; and there's one thing that may soften your anger a little, Letty: Eva's not right; she's not quite responsible. There are cases where motherhood, that should be a joy, brings nothing but mental torture and perversion of instinct. Try and remember that, if it helps you any. I'll drop in every two or three hours and I'll write David to come at once. He must take his ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and noble lady, and to know her is to love her," replied Barbara, her brown, affectionate eyes swimming in tears at the wilful perversion of her words. "May I beg, Lady Frances, that you will condescend not to question so poor and simple a girl as myself on what I know ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... no embarrassment, no hesitation, no shamefaced looks, no recoiling from the arms that were stretched out to her, or from the lips that begged; none of those delightful little pieces of awkwardness which show a virgin soul free from all perversion, in her manner of sitting on my knees, or putting her bare arms round my neck, and of offering me the back of her neck and her lips to kiss, but she laughed nervously, and her supple form trembled when I kissed her passionately on various places, and she said things to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... which met in the revolt of the peasants: their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; their scorn of the immorality of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... friend, can give. In some of his biographical sketches, with what force has he brought out the moral resolution which animated, or ought to have animated, the man of whom he is writing! We shall have occasion, by and by, to notice what, to our mind, appears a mere perversion of thought, and a mischievous exaggeration in our author, who, in his love of a certain energy of character, has often made this energy (apart from a moral purpose) the test and rule of his admiration. But at present turn to his admirable estimation of Dr Samuel Johnson, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... washing-days, and at impromptu suppers, 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 ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... heard, and placed fairly before the world their respective statements. Had Mr O'Connell alluded to the charges, he must have also adverted to the explanations, and this would not have suited him; for with all his talent for perversion, and, until the appearance of Lord Devon's report, we thought that in this respect he was unequalled, he never could have made so good a thing out of the same materials as he found left cut and dry to his hand, in the passage of the report which he so often appeals ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... is one thing and perversion of fact is another. When you stated, in answer to my sermon, that I knew the identity of the anonymous writer, you made a mistake,—I do not accuse you of wilful falsehood,—and stated what was untrue. I am to this day quite ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... absorbed manic state, the patient may be objectively in the same condition as a typical stupor. The histories of the two psychoses differentiate the two reactions which may be indistinguishable at one interview. The keynote of one reaction is indifference, while that of absorption is distraction, a perversion of attention to an inner, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... literary labours with the production of this book. Nor let any reader imagine that I here put into his hands a mere work of idle recreation. It will be found pregnant with deeper uses. The wildest extravagances of human fancy, the most deplorable perversion of human faculties, and the most horrible distortions of jurisprudence, may occasionally afford us a salutary lesson. I love in the foremost place to contemplate man in all his honours and in all the exaltation of wisdom and virtue; ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... possible for one who has a false opinion of God, to know Him in any way at all, because the object of his opinion is not God. Therefore it is clear that the sin of unbelief is greater than any sin that occurs in the perversion of morals. This does not apply to the sins that are opposed to the theological virtues, as we shall state further on (Q. 20, A. 3; Q. 34, A. 2, ad 2; Q. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... 1882 war in Egypt as well as most of the campaigns in the Soudan. I am therefore in a better position than he to declare, that his allegations are a perversion of the truth. It was neither the practice at Tel-el-Kebir nor subsequent thereto for British led troops to kill wounded men. The insinuation that they did so, or connived at such slaughter, is a stupid or a malicious falsehood. In every battle within ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... a single abstract notion of language of which all existent languages may be supposed to be the perversion. But we must not conceive that this logical figment had ever a real existence, or is anything more than an effort of the mind to give unity to infinitely various phenomena. There is no abstract language 'in rerum natura,' any more than there is an abstract ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... rid of a hated presence, but her play—which she had meant to make the closing event of the season, and by which she had hoped to conquer one or two of the remaining rungs of the social ladder—her play was rendered impossible; this affair would get into the society papers, with every perversion which wit or malice could supply—she would be ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... of all peoples contains this physiological perversion. Birds do not sing hymns; the song of the male is simply to call the female and when the pairing-season ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... impressions of the many: now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by printer's ink—that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind, printer's ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will find a new ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... time to time with a witty sally, or probably with what was more in keeping with his character—a coarse jest. And he watched the spectacle attentively from end to end. Firstly the play in verse on the subject of the judgment of Paris, a perversion of the legend favoured by the Greeks—a travesty wherein Paris—renamed Parisia—was a woman, and three gods were in rivalry for the golden apple, the emblem of her favours. Then the naval spectacle over the flooded arena, ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... shall perhaps best 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. It did not occur till I had been some months in the ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... account of the various attempts at expressing the Inexpressible' (Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series). The witch-creed may be indirectly referred, like many other absurdities, to the perversion ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... an action in order to produce the reality—which dominates so large a proportion of early religious ceremonialism. Among many nations the mysterious aspects of woman's fertility lead to rites that by a perversion of their original import appear to be obscene.[908] In the reference to the three classes of sacred prostitutes, we have an evidence that the Babylonian worship formed no exception to the rule. But with this proposition that the prostitutes were priestesses attached to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... questions of taste—and if these poems were to be arraigned for errors of what may be called taste, they might be convicted of occasional affectation in metaphor, as where the hills are 'as a stallion stal- wart, very-violet-sweet', or of some perversion of human feeling, as, for instance, the 'nostrils' relish of incense along the sanctuary side ', or 'the Holy Ghost with warm breast and with ah! bright wings', these and a few such examples are mostly efforts to force emotion ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... last night, your new French play, Le Comte de Warwick(427) which we hear has succeeded much. I must say, it does but confirm the cheap idea I have of you French: not to mention the preposterous perversion of history in so known a story, the Queen's ridiculous preference of old Warwick to a young King; the omission of the only thing she ever said or did in her whole life worth recording, which was thinking herself ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... over whom they preside, but doing what is in substance and effect the reverse; and doing it on that great scale, which contrasts so fearfully with the small one, on which the individuals who deplore such perversion of power are confined to attempt a remedy ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... thousand who sign this petition, therefore it is fair to suppose that the larger part of the women of the State have consented to the present form of government. Now, this is assuredly a willful and unworthy perversion of the truth. These women are simply ignorant, simply supine. They have neither affirmed nor denied. They have not thought at all upon the subject. But there are two thousand women in Massachusetts who think and act, to say nothing of the thousands of intelligent men there who believe in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... reason why high seasonings leads to intemperance, is in the perversion of the use of the sense of taste. Certain senses are given us to add to our pleasure as well as for the practical, almost indispensable, use they are to us. For instance, the sense of sight is not only useful, but enables us to drink in beauty, if among beautiful ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... ascribed to the Virgin Mother is purity of heart and life. Gradually in the history of the Christian church, the recognition of this became idolatry. The works of early Christian art commonly exhibit the progress of this perversion. They show how Mariolatry grew up. The first pictures of the early Christians simply represent the woman. By and by we find outlines of the mother and the child. In an after age, the Son is seen sitting on a throne, with the mother crowned, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... The perversion of so many of these once sacred chants to the service of the street ballad, suggests the trite remark ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... artist-sense is pure, and her religion, down under the perversion and ignorance of her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... is possible that the emotion I allowed to appear may have introduced some glimmering of the truth into his mind, that he may have faintly perceived how disgusted I was with his narrative; but such is the perversion of feeling among a portion of the colonists, that they cannot conceive how anyone can sympathize with the black race as their fellow men. In theory and practice they regard them as wild beasts whom it ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... but her cold, green eyes were quivering in accordance with the smile that stretched her thin lips to a line of mocking mirth. One glimpse of sympathy would have carried me to her arms for refuge—distasteful as she was to me in every way save one. She, like myself, was a woman. But such perversion of all natural feeling estranged me from her irreconcilably ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... account, to claim all the benefits of that law 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 be tried, he shall claim the protection of those ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ophthalmology in a diagnosis of optical diseases, tell us of a symptom of infirmity which they call pseudoblepsis, or 'false sight.' Legal vision exhibits, now and then, a corresponding phase of unconscious perversion of sight, whereby objects are perceived that do not exist, and objects present become transformed, distorted; and such an instance of exaggerated metamorphosia is presented to-day, in the perverted vision of the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... in the way are the result of a perversion of civilization, and the cause of much contraction ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... inducement to make any change. The study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so there are no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long residence in France, while the Revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme of wickedness, I had frequent opportunities of being an eye-witness of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... 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
... faith. For faith desires to be the only service of God, and will grant this name and honor to no other work, except in so far as faith imparts it, as it does when the work is done in faith and by faith. This perversion is indicated in the Old Testament, when the Jews left the Temple and sacrificed at other places, in the green parks and on the mountains. This is what these men also do: they are zealous to do all works, but this chief work of faith they ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... the wife's reply. "And what is more, I never will consent to such a perversion of ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... philosophical. 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; ...
— Charmides • Plato
... let that go with open hands. She wanted, 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 and endure. She smiled buoyantly, in the intervals of arranging it, at the idea that ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the fact,—at once interesting and important,—that if a traveler in the central regions of that continent could be accompanied by his wife, the chances of his success would be greatly improved? In the apparent celibacy of explorers, barbarous races perceive simply an absence or perversion of the masculine instinct, which at ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... suffer by such unprincipled practices. After ten years upon the bench, I never witness a conviction of crime without pain; but that pain is light, compared with the distress of knowing of a wilful perversion of justice. It is a relief to me to be able to say to you that such instances are, in my judgment, exceedingly rare, and—so keen is the awful searching power of truth—are ...
— Eli - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... when captured by man, that St Hilaire makes two great classes of animals 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 can be ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... Elaps. Two species are known; the harlequin snake, which ranges throughout the Gulf states to Texas and up the Mississippi River to Ohio, and the Sonoran coral snake, found in the Southwest only. By a strange perversion of facts, while the harmless hog-nosed snake enjoys a repute of terror, the Elaps, most dangerous of all American reptiles, is commonly regarded as harmless. Partly this is due to its slight and graceful prettiness, partly to its ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... 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 and gracious intention in betrusting ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... yet frame an impartial judgment and the danger is not seen by all, there is one thing that cannot be denied or disputed, and that is that the treaties are the negation of the principles for which the United States and Italy, without any obligation on them, entered the War; they are a perversion of all the Entente had repeatedly proclaimed; they break into pieces President Wilson's fourteen points which were a solemn pledge for the American people, and to-morrow they will be the greatest moral weapon with which the conquered of to-day ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... premisses of this argument are true, and so also is the conclusion, strictly as it stands. It is true that the Fathers accuse Marcion of tampering with the text in various places, both in the Epistles and in the Gospels where the allegation can be tested, and where it is found that the supposed perversion is simply a difference of reading, proved to be such by its presence in other authorities [Endnote 217:2]. But what is this to the point? It is not contended that Marcion altered to any considerable extent (though he did slightly even in the Epistles [Endnote 217:3]) the text which he retained, ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... whom those articles were framed were educated in the Church of Rome, and opposed themselves rather to the perversion of its power than ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... old departmental hand. They have their own morality. My line of inquiry would appear to him an awful perversion of duty. For him the plain duty is to fasten the guilt upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on some slight indications he had picked up in the course of his investigation on the spot; whereas I, he ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... 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 our searches—let ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... What 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
... instruction for the protection of the youth of both sexes. The Chicago Vice Commission concluded that "the lack of information, education and training with reference to the function and control of the sexual instinct, and the consequences of its abuse and perversion, appears at every point of our inquiry for the sources of the supply of the victims of vice, either as the cause of the perversion of children and youth or as a complication of all other causes."[6] Of course, we dare not dream that any sex-instruction that now seems possible ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... these people live, is 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 ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... business" had any share in influencing our Government's decision to enter the war is an insult to the President and Congress, a libel on American citizenship, and a malicious perversion or ignorant misconception of the facts. Those who continue to circulate that insinuation lay themselves open to just suspicion of their motives and should receive neither ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... the full maturity of his talent. He denies that the prevailing discontents are due to some factious libellers exciting the people, who have no interest in disorder, but are only roused by the impatience of suffering. The discontents were real, and their cause was a perversion of the true principles on which the Constitution rested. As hitherto, business had gone alternately through the hands of Whigs and Tories, the opposition controlling the government; but now a court faction had sprung ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... milk 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
... organized natures see or create 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 he considered ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... eminent unbelievers. It is curious to read their own accounts of themselves, the rather as they accord so exactly with the result of our own observation.—We find that they once perhaps gave a sort of implicit hereditary assent to the truth of Christianity, and were what, by a mischievous perversion of language, the world denominates believers. How were they then awakened from their sleep of ignorance? At what moment did the light of truth beam in upon them, and dissipate the darkness in which they had been involved? The period of their infidelity is marked by no such ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... no grace of God; or those who deny to them the name of saints forget the words of Him Who said: By their fruits ye shall know them; of Him Who said, too: That the unpardonable sin, the sin which shewed complete moral perversion, the sin against the Holy Spirit of God, was to attribute good deeds to bad motives, and say: He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... and the fortunes of prosperity and of adversity are all, in every detail, true to human nature, and I have not taken upon myself to make the slightest addition, or alteration, which might lead to the perversion of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... de Musset's versions, Louise Colet has furnished a third in her Lui, a publication which bears the stamp of insincerity on almost every page, and which has been described, I think by Maxime du Camp, as worse than a lying invention—namely, as a systematic perversion of the truth. A passage from George Sand's Elle et Lui, in which Therese and Laurent, both artists, are the representatives of the novelist and poet, will indicate how she wishes ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... priests, sprung of the same people and 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 civilising processes, he should suddenly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism and every kind of incantation. I invoke no Acheron to overwhelm him in the whirlpools of its muddy gulf. I do not tell the respectable mover and seconder, by a perversion of their sense and expressions, that their proposition halts between the ridiculous and the dangerous. I am not one of those who start up, three at a time, and fall upon and strike at him with so much eagerness that our daggers hack one another in his sides. My honorable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... is not all, the original Hebrew of this emphatic declaration has a singular force, the idea it expresses is as follows, "I will make it (or "place it," the crown of Judah, i. e. the Messiahship) an occasion of perversion, of perversion, of perversion, and it shall be-no more till he come whose right it is, and I will give it him." Viewed in this light, who will deny that this declaration has been most strangely fulfilled? The Christians ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... and the preceding verses should tempt any of our readers to purchase Mr. Southey's volume, we can warrant equal entertainment in all its other parts, and shall heartily wish the gentleman all happiness with his poet.—To us, there appears a thorough perversion of taste, in the conception and execution of the whole; and we are disgusted with the tameness of the verse, the vulgarity of the thoughts, and the barbarity of the manners. If this style of writing be continued, we may ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... most intellectual art, breathing the repose of divinity, the grand inaction of the All-powerful; shadowing forth in this its perfection, sublime truth, with its faint, troubled, yet still sublime reflection, error;—the "without passions" of Divine revelation, and its perversion, its undue development, the unconsciousness, issuing in the final perfection of annihilation, of Braminical deity. So are the extremes of truth and error linked—the error depending for its existence on its antagonist truth. Painting is objective, sculpture subjective, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... 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 in the past, and a further inquiry as to the need for it in the future, as preliminary to ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... there is this same restless seeking to express what is highest and best in man; not only to express his love of adventure, but his love of social intercourse and his love of beauty. When we once realize that certain vices are merely a perversion of good instincts, we have taken the first step ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... years ago forty mills were debasing the immemorial and gigantic sequoia into mere timber in its last refuge in California. But even the general public sees now that this was a barbarous and idiotic perversion of relative values. What is a little perishable timber, for which substitutes can be found elsewhere, compared with a grove of trees that will be the wonder and delight of generations? What is the fleeting but abominable gratification of destroying the harmless ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... 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
... believe that absolute perversion of moral character went to its "own place," and bore the consequence ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... did not rise in mere self-will, but to gain their freedom, the most precious possession of mankind. Remember, too, that to shew mercy is better than to shed blood; the sword killeth, but the favor of the ruler bringeth joy and happiness. Conclude the war as speedily as possible, for war is a perversion of nature; in peace the sons outlive the fathers, but in war the fathers live to mourn for their slain sons. Farewell, my young ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... decently—honestly; 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
... biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry. They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion, conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that prayer, as thousands do, and omit to offer it in the name of Christ. The custom of Masons, and other secret orders, of having a form of religion that ignores Christ, that does not recognize His mediatorship and that is not offered in His name, is supremely wicked. It is a gross perversion of the religion of Jesus. And how Christian men, even preachers of the gospel, can find it in their hearts to acquiesce in such a thing, is to us a profound puzzle. The institution that has no place for my Master has no ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... impregnated with vague 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 Greeks ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... against such a proposal. Those who support it contend that 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 violence. Apart from the moral aspect of the case, these arguments ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... 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 ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... (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
... 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
... of God's injustice toward him, he resorted to misrepresentation of the words and acts of the Creator. It was his policy to perplex the angels with subtle arguments concerning the purposes of God. Everything that was simple he shrouded in mystery, and by artful perversion cast doubt upon the plainest statements of Jehovah. His high position, in such close connection with the divine administration, gave greater force to his representations, and many were induced to unite with him ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... good name and dignity of his own family. That ideal of simplicity and directness which he regarded as the very essence of domestic morality had been blurred and marred within his own home by the taint of that poison which he believed to threaten the perversion of English life. From its encroachments he would fain have kept his own household free; but it was in that household that he saw that poison first assert itself, and even encroach upon the royal dignity which, by tradition and by principle, was to Hyde ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... 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 let us suppose, too, that some of the servants were infected in this way, and that ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... his hand as they are in part the work of another; and proof on the opposite side from the open and clamorous charge of his rivals, whose imputations can be made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of such frank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forge against their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of a charge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... against him, but against all who are willing, like him, to encourage such a miserable perversion of truth. Believe them, and you make patriotism anything, and ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... tribes of living nature tend? Why beast, and bird, and all the countless race Of earth and waters, each his proper place Instinctive knows, and through the endless chain Of being moves in one harmonious strain; While man alone, with strange perversion, draws Rebellious fame from Nature's broken laws? Methinks I hear, in that still voice which stole On Horeb's mount o'er rapt Elijah's soul, With stern reproof indignant Heaven reply: 'Tis o'erweening Pride, that blinds the eye Of reasoning man, and o'er his darkened ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... no answer to this, as if too much overcome by the true state of the case to be troubled by its perversion. Mr. Arbuton, following them on board, felt himself in the unpleasant character of persecutor, some one to be shunned and escaped by every maneuver possible to self-respect. He was to be the means, it appeared, of spoiling the enjoyment of the voyage for ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... disputed. That, at any rate, seems to be a solid achievement. But he went on to declare that when we inquire by what method this evolution was brought about biologists can return no answer. That appears to me to be a most extraordinary perversion of the truth. The reason why the gradual evolution of the various kinds of organisms is not now disputed is that Darwin showed the method by which that evolution can and must be brought about. So far from "returning no answer," Darwin and succeeding generations of biologists do ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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 seeds ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... serious reason why high seasonings leads to intemperance, is in the perversion of the use of the sense of taste. Certain senses are given us to add to our pleasure as well as for the practical, almost indispensable, use they are to us. For instance, the sense of sight is not only useful, but enables us to drink in beauty, if among beautiful surroundings, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... the stream bubbled up, the stone shook and swayed with its force; and Diamond thought he would try to lift it. Lightly it rose to his hand, forced up by the stream from below; and, by what would have seemed an unaccountable perversion of things had he been awake, threatened to come tumbling upon his head. But he avoided it, and when it fell, got upon it. He now saw that the opening through which the water came pouring in was over his head, and with the help of the stone he scrambled out by it, and found himself ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... word; but it means dull, ugly things, a perversion of the higher activities of man, of art, literature, religion, philosophy; and a perversion to which we are all apt to be blind. We know that in these activities specialization is a condition of excellence. As Keats said to Shelley, in art it is necessary to serve both God ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... 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 ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... 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 God who could note their ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of its perversion of 2Kings xii. in its reproduction of the nearly related and closely connected section 2Kings xxii. 3-IO. It is worth while once more to ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... reproduction is greater,[59] 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 ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... departure. It is possible that the emotion I allowed to appear may have introduced some glimmering of the truth into his mind, that he may have faintly perceived how disgusted I was with his narrative; but such is the perversion of feeling among a portion of the colonists, that they cannot conceive how anyone can sympathize with the black race as their fellow men. In theory and practice they regard them as wild beasts whom ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... doctrines exercise any influence for the perversion of public morals? Much; their influence is disastrous. And do the men who profess them believe them, taking the word 'believe' in its real and deep meaning? No; they often do mischief which they do not mean to do, and do not see that they do. They are intoxicated with a ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 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
... obstacles, and setting at defiance the tyranny of the ruling powers with the sole prestige of the animated word, Prophetism undertook to revivify the religious idea, almost extinguished, or crushed under the weight of universal perversion. But to repress with greater force the overflowing depravity, and to combat the evil with an opposite extreme, it was proper to divest the religious idea of its particularising and national forms, and to present it in its more ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... the truth can be put most pointedly thus: that democracy has one real enemy, and that is civilization. Those utilitarian miracles which science has made are anti-democratic, not so much in their perversion, or even in their practical result, as in their primary shape and purpose. The Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not perhaps in thinking that machines would make fewer men workmen; but certainly in thinking that machines would make fewer men masters. More wheels ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the most striking instances of the way in which mistakes of chronology may lead to the perversion of historical records is shown in the Book of Daniel in connexion with the familiar account of the capture of Babylon by Cyrus. Within the past generation records of Cyrus have been brought to light, as well as records of the conquered Babylonian king himself, which show that the Hebrew ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... stopped sooner, you would have been unsatisfied. If you had stopped later, you would have been dissatisfied. It is a criminal contempt of the magnificent possibilities of life not to lay hold of "God's occasions floating by." It is an equally criminal perversion of them to cling tenaciously to what was only the simulacrum of an occasion. A man will toil many days and nights among the mountains to find an ingot of gold, which, found, he bears home with infinite pains and just rejoicing; but he would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... also, in common with Roman morality, the advantage of being comparatively free from the perverting influences of tribal superstition. [Footnote: From religious perversion Roman law was eminently free: but it could not be free from perverting influences of a social kind; so that we ought to be cautious, for instance, in borrowing law on any subject concerning the relations ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... resisteth His will?" asks the Apostle. (Rom. ix. 19.) "The streams of sacred rivers are flowing upwards, and justice and the universal order is wrenched back." (Euripides, Medea, 499.) It is only the perversion spoken of by the poet, that can anywise supply the instance asked for by the Apostle. The thing is impossible in the physical order. The rivers cannot flow upwards, under the conditions under which rivers usually ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... when the Growler again changed hands, he counts it in again, in the total, as if it were an entirely different boat, although he invariably rules out of the American list all recaptured vessels. A more serious perversion of facts are his statements about comparative tonnage. This was at that time measured arbitrarily, the depth of hold being estimated at half the breadth of beam; and the tonnage of our lake vessels was put down exactly as if they were regular ocean cruisers of the same dimensions in length ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. The robber may be seized, and the invader repelled, whenever they are found; they who pretend no right but that of force, may by force be punished or suppressed. But when plunder bears the name of impost, and murder is perpetrated ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... not been able to invest it with a religious sanction. There is no more beautiful book in the sacred literature of the Hindus; there is none in which the more enlightened find greater spiritual comfort; yet it is in the Bhagvat Gita that, by a strange perversion, the Hindu conspirator has sought and claims to have found texts that justify murder as a divinely inspired deed when it is committed in the sacred cause of Hinduism. Nor is it only the extremists who appeal ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an offender's innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me I was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised. Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... his parents; for the same reason that they serve their temples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that they sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual perversion. They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men with traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the gestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are in hundreds of other ways; and I can ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... or prophet, to make a rapid fortune by the practice of medicine or theology. The number of lunatics increased continually; suicides multiplied in the world of wealth, and many of them were accompanied by atrocious and extraordinary circumstances, which bore witness to an unheard o perversion of intelligence ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... plan. In a plan of reformation, it would be one of my maxims, that, when I know of an establishment which may be subservient to useful purposes, and which at the same time, from its discretionary nature, is liable to a very great perversion from those purposes, I would limit the quantity of the power that might be so abused. For I am sure that in all such cases the rewards of merit will have very narrow bounds, and that partial or corrupt favor will be infinite. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the case of a very intelligent magistrate.... Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but a complete absence of emotional reaction. If he went to the theater, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... was final, and the thrust attained him in one of his few unprotected points. It was not as though he felt either himself or his sister consciously in the wrong. He acquitted her of all fault, except as to the deadly one of misreading and misunderstanding. The fact argued not a perversion but a lack in her character. She was other than ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure." Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse their attention to my own ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter, in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events, go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that, through argument and knowledge, mankind will ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lupanaria at Rome. A scene in Sylvia Scarlett could be duplicated in any large city of Europe or America; there is no necessity of appeal to Krafft-Ebbing or Havelock Ellis. But there is still another and surer method of gauging the extent of paederastic perversion at Rome, and that is the richness of the Latin vocabulary in terms and words bearing upon this repulsive subject. There are, in the Latin language, no less than one hundred and fifteen words and expressions ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... religious men, but it is impossible in the nature of things that such effects should be produced by a pure personal devotion to Christ. We are to remember that nothing has been subjected to such multiform and grotesque perversion as Christianity. Certainly the direct love of Christ, as it was felt by its first followers, is a rare thing among modern Christians. His character has been so much obscured by scholasticism, as to have lost in a great measure its attractive power. The prevalent feeling ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... temptation. Those five presbyters are none other than the five leaders who were lately associated with the magistrates in an edict that they might overthrow our faith, that they might turn away the feeble hearts of the brethren to their deadly nets by the perversion of the truth. Now the same scheme, the same overturning, is again brought about by the five presbyters, linked with Felicissimus, to the destruction of salvation, that God should not be besought, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... which originated in the middle ages, in connection with the gross perversion of the truth of God, that this person is one of repulsive and grotesque countenance, with the figure of a monstrosity, is an invention and cannot be verified from Scripture. The Bible knows nothing of such a being with a horrible face and figure. The very opposite is the teaching ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... intellectual curiosity, but nobody had 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... being heard, and placed fairly before the world their respective statements. Had Mr O'Connell alluded to the charges, he must have also adverted to the explanations, and this would not have suited him; for with all his talent for perversion, and, until the appearance of Lord Devon's report, we thought that in this respect he was unequalled, he never could have made so good a thing out of the same materials as he found left cut and dry to his hand, in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... somewhat heated language of Mrs. Jameson, "whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable and grave, whatever hath passion or admiration in the changes of fortune or the refluxes of feeling, whatever is pitiful in the weakness, grand in the strength, or terrible in the perversion of the human intellect," be the domain of tragedy, this correspondence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... the perils of perversion from true Catholic principles which the course of affairs in these days made him dread exceedingly, and hold himself ready to act like the Non-jurors, or the Free Kirk men in Scotland, who had resigned all for the sake of principle. "Nevertheless," he wrote, "I suppose it is one's duty to ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... what specious reasoning can any one maintain that it is honest to tax the great body of women citizens, to count them in the basis of representation, and yet deny to them the right of personal representation at the ballot box? What excuse can be made for this monstrous perversion of liberty? Each one of you, gentlemen, sits here as the representative of thousands of women who, by their money, have helped to build this Capitol in which you assemble and to pay for the seats in which you sit; nay, more, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... confidence, love, and veneration, which it has ever enjoyed whilst it was supposed the corrective and control of the acting powers of the state. This would be the event, though its conduct in such a perversion of its functions should be tolerably just and moderate; but if it should be iniquitous, violent, full of passion, and full of faction, it would be considered as the most intolerable of all the modes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... bondage, ignorance, and 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 of its productions ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... which he fell prevented him from resisting the desire to absorb new doses of poison, a desire as imperious, as irresistible in morphinism as that of alcohol for the alcoholic, and more terrible in its effects—the perversion of the intellectual faculties, loss of will, of memory, of judgment, paralysis, or the mania that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... hear gossip, uncharitableness and suspicion of neighbors, witness arrogant sharp-dealing or lax honor, their own characters can scarcely escape perversion. In the same way others can not easily fail to be thoroughbred who have never seen or heard their parents do or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... At such perversion of reasonable criticism is the exegesis of the Veda arrived in one direction. But in another it is gone astray no less, as misdirected by its clever German leader. In three volumes[21] Brunnhofer has endeavored to prove that ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the withdrawal of thousands of young men from industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren negative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress upon the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the perversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability and refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... 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 ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... 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
... me to do about it?" retorted District Attorney Peckham in his office next morning when Mr. Tutt had explained to him the perversion of justice to accomplish which the law had been invoked. "I'm sorry! No doubt he's a good feller. But he's guilty, isn't he? Admitted it in the police court, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... She wanted, 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 and endure. ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 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
... in vain on this question, and that their facts and arguments are viewed with plausible indifference, or insidious opposition, by persons whose appetites and instincts have been undergoing debasement, and perversion from the very dawn of their lives. My own deliberate conviction is that nothing but harm comes to nursing mothers, and to the infants who are dependent upon them, by the ordinary use of alcoholic ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... will be seen under the microscope, but its organic connection is shown, indeed, by evidence: serious affections of the brain and all so-called mental diseases, to the best of my belief, show themselves first of all in the perversion of the moral law." ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... not constitute the "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
... throat to prevent itself from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious perversion of ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... which we dread. My text brings us face to face with that solemn thought that there are conditions of human nature, in which the God who ought to be our dearest joy and most ardent desire becomes our ghastliest dread. The root of such an unnatural perversion of all that a creature ought to feel towards its loving Creator lies in the simple consciousness of discordance between God and man, which is the shadow cast over the heart by the fact of sin. God is righteous; God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... opinion that Gnosticism was fundamentally a perversion of Christianity finds its most striking expression in the phrase of Harnack that it was "the acute secularizing or Hellenizing of Christianity" (History of Dogma, English translation, I, 226). The foundation for this representation ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... sorry to say that, the knowledge of charms is not confined to the creation of beneficial talismans. Its perversion has led to the diabolical practices of the Voodo and Black Magician, whose work is wholly, either for gain or revenge. Nothing, but the most extreme selfishness lies beneath such immoral practices, but, as there must be a light ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... was the first 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 and Dr. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... those profane and solemn farces prepared their congregations to desire what their employers had previously determined to do; thus giving an air of divine inspiration to the projects of fraud, murder, and ambition. By such a perversion of public worship, joined with an affectation of disinterested purity, that celebrated preparative for military despotism, the self-denying ordinance was introduced into the Commons. After numerous prayers and sermons, intreating Providence to strengthen ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Indians that never could be caught, killed, or crippled, though two regiments were hurried into Gloucester and battled with them for a fortnight. Thus, the rumor went around that these were not an enemy of flesh and blood, but devils who hoped to work a moral perversion of the colony. From 1692, when they appeared, until Salem witchcraft was at an end, Cape Ann was under military and spiritual guard against ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... for 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 ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... We differ there. No, hers is not a cruel nature. I do not consider her as meaning to wound my feelings. The evil lies yet deeper: in her total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings; in a perversion of mind which made it natural to her to treat the subject as she did. She was speaking only as she had been used to hear others speak, as she imagined everybody else would speak. Hers are not faults of temper. She would ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... 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 scoundrels, assassins, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... lack of injurious treatment. The witches were called filthy, indecent, shameless, immoral. Nevertheless, their first steps on that road may be accounted as a happy revolution in things most moral, in charity and kindness. With a monstrous perversion of ideas the Middle Ages viewed the flesh in its representative, woman,—accursed since the days of Eve—as a thing impure. The Virgin, exalted as Virgin more than as Our Lady, far from lifting up ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... to put it mildly, a perversion of the truth. I was not very comfortable; I was wet to the skin, and my bran-new uniform, upon which I so greatly prided myself, was just about ruined. But it was then too late for the oil-skin ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... succeeding: 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 to Smollett or Hume. Personal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... is another instance of perversion. Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust the blase aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the Bush' employed to attract the attention ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... constantly suffering from depression of spirits, a malady which appears in countless forms. There is not a human being in whose mental constitution there is not something wrong; some weakness, some perversion, some positive vice. And if you want further proof of the truth of what I am saying, given by one whose testimony is worth much more than mine, go and read that eloquent and kindly and painfully fascinating book lately published by Dr. Forbes Winslow, on Obscure Diseases ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... word comes to denote a number of things not only independently of any common attribute, but which have actually no attribute in common; or none but what is shared by other things to which the name is capriciously refused.(13) Even scientific writers have aided in this perversion of general language from its purpose; sometimes because, like the vulgar, they knew no better; and sometimes in deference to that aversion to admit new words, which induces mankind, on all subjects not considered technical, to attempt to make ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of the sun are symbolized, while the ingenuity with which they press their argument cannot but be admired, it is evident that, by such an interpretation, they yield all that Masonry has gained of religious development in past ages, and fall back upon that corruption and perversion of Sabaism from which it was the object, even of the Spurious Freemasonry of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... of the debtor, and in this way it pertains to this kind of due that a man represent himself to others just as he is, both in word and deed. Wherefore to justice is annexed truth, whereby, as Tully says (De invent. ii, 53), present, past and future things are told without perversion. It may also be considered from the point of view of the person to whom it is due, by comparing the reward he receives with what he has done—sometimes in good things; and then annexed to justice we have ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... was most ingenious. The ingenuity indeed may be said to be Satanic, for it debased its victims morally as well as socially and physically. It worked by means of treachery, covetousness, perfidy, and the perversion of all natural affections. The trail of the serpent was over the whole system. For example, when the last Duke of Ormond arrived as lord lieutenant in 1703, the Commons waited on him with a bill 'for discouraging the further growth of Popery,' which became law, having met his ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... 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 and a ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... of the Two Messengers. In the last versions of it which I have quoted, a feature to be noticed is the perversion of the message by one of the messengers, who brings tidings of death instead of life eternal to men. The same perversion of the message reappears in some examples of the next type of story which I shall illustrate, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... been told, and by those whose business it is to know such things, that the models created by great Paris dressmakers are not always flashes of genius which come in the night, nor the wilful perversion of an existing fashion, to force the world of women into discarding, and buying everything new. It may look suspiciously like it when we see a mere swing of the pendulum carrying the straight sheath out to the ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... now turn aside and imbibe the turbid waters of a corrupt and corrupting literature? Alas! that she should now prefer fiction and folly to the healthful writings of wise men. Deplorable is it, that her past lessons of instruction, so many and so faithful, must now, by her own indolence or perversion, prove to have fallen on her ear, like snow-flakes ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... pleasantly Mr. Stackpole 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, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have in my head some floating ideas on the 'Logos', which I hope, hereafter, to mould into a consistent form; but it is a gross perversion of the truth, in 'Socinians', to declare that we believe in 'Three Gods', and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice, affirm that we believe in 'three suns'. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... nasty mind," the girl said. "Something, by the way, which I have often suspected." She regarded Malone darkly. "Do you always do that to strangers? Is it some new sort of perversion?" ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 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 and gracious intention in betrusting them with such ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... 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 private interpretation ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... 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 ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... came in finally, and said in his sweetest manner (which is a very disagreeable one) that he had vast experience, and had "never known a man stand on his extreme rights and gain by it." This I felt to be a monstrous perversion of the case, and I was glad on the morning of the 9th to find that my reasons were very fairly stated in the Standard, the Telegraph, and the Daily News. Chamberlain had seen Escott of the Standard, and Lawson of the Telegraph, and I had seen ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... He was carried 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 right and just at the command of a league between England's rebellious ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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 try to mislead; ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the ravages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone—that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... character and constitution at the same time. Depravity of thought and secretion go together. Degradation of mind and corruption of the body are concomitants. There is a very close affinity between mental and moral perversion and physical prostitution, of which fact too many are unconscious. Nervous influence preserves the fluidity of the blood and facilitates its circulation, for it appears that simple arrestment of this influence ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the doing of barren toilsome unrewarding things for the sake of the toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There is neither honour nor virtue nor ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... the natural way of the race. They seemed to think that it savored of impurity. Such a notion is the result of a perverted idea of the sacredness of natural functions—a seeing of impurity—where all is pure. What a perversion, this regarding the sacredness of human Fatherhood, and Motherhood, as impure! The man of true spirituality sees in the Divine Trinity of Father, Mother and Child, something most pure and sacred—something ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... it is not impossible that some kind of accidental justice may be found, as it is not impossible that the arrow a blind man shoots into a crowd may chance to strike a parricide. But to found a law upon this accidental justice is a fresh perversion of mystery, for elements are thereby introduced into human morality which have no right to be there; elements which we would welcome, which would be of value, if they stood for definite truths; but seeing that they are as alien to truth as to actual life, they should be ruthlessly swept aside. ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... between intellectual and moral perversion is strikingly typified by the way in which he alternates from the unveracious to the absurd, from misrepresentation to contradiction. Side by side with the abduction of "facts" such as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on one page that the Trinity ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... it possible for one who has a false opinion of God, to know Him in any way at all, because the object of his opinion is not God. Therefore it is clear that the sin of unbelief is greater than any sin that occurs in the perversion of morals. This does not apply to the sins that are opposed to the theological virtues, as we shall state further on (Q. 20, A. 3; Q. 34, A. 2, ad 2; Q. 39, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... can see in this aught save the clearest sympathy with the gradual advance of Emancipation, he must be indeed gifted with a strange faculty of perversion. If, however, the Democrats indorse the President's recommendation and approve the Executive policy of gradual emancipation for the sake of the white man, why do they continue to abuse so fiercely presses which agree exactly with ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... estates of 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 reading [Greek: AUTOU] ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... and weep over each other's absence in uncontrollable agony, the conditions are serious enough for the consultation of a physician. It is an abnormal state of affairs, and if probed thoroughly might be found to be a sort of perversion, a sex mania, needing immediate ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... perished. I am bound to say that in the history of the world, while religious institutions have been valuable and have done a great deal of good, they have perhaps done as much harm as good. There is scarcely one single perversion of civil government, there is scarcely one single persecution of men, there is scarcely a single one of the great wars that have depopulated the globe, there is scarcely one great heresy developed out of the tyranny of the church, that has not been the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 can not always appease a civil convulsion, have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... write to me from Lourdes,' he said. 'But Lourdes is, I suppose, the reason of her perversion to Rome?' ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... has a figure not far from triangular, of which this line is the perpendicular and the shore of the St. Lawrence from the Chaudiere to the Metis the base. It contains about 16,000 square miles. It would have been a perversion of language in Mr. Mauduit to describe this to his employers as a narrow tract. But the space whose cession he really intended to advise is in every sense a narrow tract, for its length along the St. Lawrence ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... presents no new general fact to the eye of history. The attempt to eliminate the eternal feminine from her natural and normal sphere in the scheme of things there met with the same certain and signal disaster that awaits every perversion of human activity. Beginning with a band of zealous, earnest men, sincere in their convictions, to whom the cause was all and their personalities nothing, it there, as elsewhere, passed through its usual cycle of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 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
... will be morally and physically a success. Here, too, the fact should be strongly stressed that prostitution cannot be justified on any moral grounds. It represents a deliberate ignoring of the rightful function of sex, and the perversion of the sane and natural laws of reproduction. It is in marriage, in the sane and normal activities of that unit of our whole social system—the family—that reproduction develops nature's basic principle of perpetuation in the highest and worthiest manner, in obedience to ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... dogma of Transmigration, which has stamped a deeper impress on later Hindu mind than almost any other doctrine. Caste is fully established, though in Vedic days scarcely, if at all, recognized. The dreadful practice of widow-burning has been brought in, and this by a most daring perversion of the Vedic texts. Woman, in fact, has fallen far below the position ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... 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 a denial ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... should mean nouns subsequent. Both these rules are therefore false, and fit only to bewilder; and the examples to both are totally inapplicable. Murray's was once essentially right, but he afterwards corrupted it, and a multitude of his admirers have since copied the perversion. It formerly stood thus: "The pronominal adjectives this and that, &c. and the numbers[209] one, two, &c., must agree in number with their substantives: as, 'This book, these books; that sort, those sorts; one girl, ten girls; another road, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... forged records of a fictitious lodge, and the people would not know whom to believe. Next he was said to have bargained for the support of Daniel Webster, by promising to distribute offices to Federalists. This accusation was a cruel perversion of his very virtues; for its only foundation lay in the fact that in the venturesome but honorable attempt to be President of a nation rather than of a party, he had in some instances given offices to old Federalists, certainly with no hope or possibility of reconciling ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... joy thereby to become essentially different in kind, though different in degree, supposing him to remain the same being, and to possess the same human nature. Now, man's fall has not altered this principle. Sin is a perversion of human nature, not its annihilation; a disorder of its powers, not their destruction. Nor is restoration by Jesus Christ the gift of a different constitution, as if He made us something else than human beings, but the renovation of the old constitution ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... not destruction, of its original concepts. The system continued to bring immigrants into the colony which had been a very important purpose when inaugurated. But the abuses threw out of balance the relation between patented land and the number of people in the colony; and furthermore through perversion of the system, speculation in land was not prevented and there resulted large areas of wholly uncultivated and uninhabited lands to which title had been granted. The headright was also originally intended to apply to inhabitants of the British Isles, but by the middle ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... compassion is an advocate within us in their behalf, to gain the unhappy admittance and access, to make their case attended to. If it sometimes serves a contrary purpose, and makes men industriously turn away from the miserable, these are only instances of abuse and perversion: for the end, for which the affection was given us, most certainly is not to make us avoid, but to make us attend to, the objects of it. And if men would only resolve to allow thus much to it: let it bring before ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... all mysteries that one in flesh and blood can say such things of Himself; but it is a perversion of language to speak of these sayings as "philosophical terminology." They are in a different sphere from all more human philosophy, and, indeed, are opposed to every form of it. Philosophy herself requires a new birth before she can so much as ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... neurasthenia, or in mania. { Anesthesia (absence of sensation) { as in the numbness of hysteria; in sensory { paralysis. Disorders / Retardation of < as in dementia and melancholia. Sensation "Clouding" or dulness { as in simple depression. { Perversion { as in dementia and melancholia. Sweet may taste sour; fresh ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... destroying the former by hunger and the latter by a terrified conscience. It makes of God the devil, and of the devil God. It makes hell of heaven and heaven of hell; righteousness of sin, and sin of righteousness. This I call perversion—where strictest justice is the most ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... circumstances, the green cobweb of a scarf Maggie had brought to the roof as protection against the elements; and when he took the dancing-floor with her, he swung her about and hopped up and down and stepped in and out with all the skill of a master of the modern perversion of dancing. Barney was really good enough to have been a professional dancer had his desires not led him toward what seemed to him a more exciting ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... and the teacher to a little audience of one. Teachers are "artists to whom the most priceless material has been committed."[16] There is an idea abroad that those who are not clever enough to perform can always take to teaching, but this is of course a lamentable perversion of the truth. There are diversities of gifts, but the same spirit, and certainly as high a degree of spiritual perception is necessary for the teacher as for the executive artist. The teacher has merely chosen ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Christ. i, 3, 4). Therefore whoever sins enjoys a mutable good. Now "to enjoy what we should use is human perverseness," as Augustine again says (Qq. lxxxiii, qu. 30). Therefore, since "perverseness" [*The Latin 'pervertere' means to overthrow, to destroy, hence 'perversion' of God's law is a mortal sin.] denotes a mortal sin, it seems ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... these 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 ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Secretary's hand? Again, critics make much of the fact that shortly before the raid Mr. Chamberlain sold to the Chartered Company the strip of land from which the raid started, and that he made a hard bargain, exacting as much as 200,000l. for it. Surely the perversion of an argument could hardly go further, for if Mr. Chamberlain were in their confidence and in favour of their plan it is certain that he would have given them easy and not difficult terms for the land for which they asked. The supposition that Mr. Chamberlain was the tool of ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... III. Cape Breton and the Southerly Coast of Newfoundland, here claimed to have been discovered, were known previously. Perversion of the Text of the ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... difference—in the present case, the power of taxation is converted into that of regulating industry; in the other the power of regulating industry, by the regulation of commerce, was attempted to be converted into the power of taxation. Were I to trace the analogy further, we should find that the perversion of the taxing power, in the one case, has given precisely the same control to the northern section over the industry of the southern section of the Union, which the power to regulate commerce gave to Great Britain over the industry of the Colonies in the ...
— Remarks of Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina on the bill to prevent the interference of certain federal officers in elections: delivered in the Senate of the United States February 22, 1839 • John C. Calhoun
... whole world kin"—that one touch of their common failing being an uneasy love of novelty. Was ever poet's or sage's meaning so perverted, so reversed! And yet it is hopeless to think of bringing about a change in the general use of this line and a cessation of its perversion to sentimental purposes, not to say an application of it as the scourge for which it was wrought; just as it is hopeless to think of changing by any demonstration of unfitness and unmeaningness a phrase in general use—the reason being that the mass ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... which have cast a gloom upon this mortal scene. The intellectual powers bestowed upon her by the Gods were great and eminent, and were given for a far different purpose than to be employed in these sinister pursuits. But all conspicuous talents are liable, my son, to base perversion; and such was the fate of those of Rodogune. She delighted in the actions which her dark and criminal alliance with invisible powers enabled her to perform. It was her's to mislead the benighted shepherd. It was Sher's to part the happy lovers. For ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... Carver's had been disappointed, as the phrase is, when a young girl; another girl had won her lover from her. Her disappointment had hardened her to the perception of the neighbours; and, by a strange perversion of the sympathies and faculties, she had turned from gossip and censure, from religion, and from all the sources of comfort that the bruised heart of Corbitant naturally turned to, and found such consolation as came to her in books, that is to say romances, and especially the romances ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau's hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... he loved, the children whom he idolized? What is it that enables him to bear the remembrance, but the belief that he acted as his duty enjoined? Would you rashly bereave him of this belief? Would you restore him to himself, and convince him that he was instigated to this dreadful outrage by a perversion of his organs, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... the abundant 'sweetness' of the book cannot make beautiful this monstrous perversion of reason, this insidious attack on the very distinction ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... also fit in; and that the more, by how much they be unlike Thee; but with the superior creatures, by how much they become more like to Thee. And I enquired what iniquity was, and found it to be substance, but the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee, O God, the Supreme, towards these lower things, and casting out its bowels, and ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
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