"Perversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... infernal. And this descent to hell, though rapid to the point of astonishment, was by no means easy. Rather was it violent and remorseless—a driving as by reiterated blows, a rude merciless dragging onward and downward. Yet even so, for all the anguish and shame—as of unseemly exposure—the perversion of her intention and action, the scorn so ruthlessly poured upon her, it was less of herself, the compelled, than of Richard, the compelling, that she thought. For even while his anger thus drove and dragged her, he himself ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... is no use getting into an anger," said Mackenzie suavely, "when common sense will do as well whatever. And there wass no perversion and there wass no fraud talked about. It wass just this, Mr. Ingram, that if the old lady's will leaves you her property, who will you be getting to believe that she did not mean to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... for in the following manner: "In all Christian ages the especial glory 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, but sitting, as yet, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... overrules personal judgment and character, and puts the whole group at the mercy of the clique which is ruling at the moment. It produces the dominance of watchwords and phrases which take the place of reason and conscience in determining conduct. The patriotic bias is a recognized perversion of thought and judgment against which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... sought not in the afterthoughts of posterity, but in the elements out of which they have arisen. For the previous stage is a tendency towards the ideal at which they are aiming; the later is a declination or deviation from them, or even a perversion of them. No man's thoughts were ever so well expressed by his disciples as ...
— Philebus • Plato
... subject, have not resulted in the wished for event, nevertheless, we invite your vigilant and persevering opposition to this disgraceful traffic, and attention to the discovery and prosecution of the offenders, and we are willing to hope that though a partial perversion of the public sentiment, and the cupidity of interested individuals, may for a time, present considerable discouragement, yet that the virtuous exertions of the friends of the human race, will at last be blessed with the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... don't know. It's probably a perversion of stint, a task or part, which is also to be found in the dictionary as stent. What does it matter? There is the word, and there is the thing, and both are charming. I approve of the stunt because it is always the stuntist's own. He ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... so strange a perversion, I showed this letter to the First Consul. He shrugged up his shoulders and said, laughing, "Take no notice of him, he is a fool; give yourself no ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... how urgent it is that each should guard his lips, chasten his pen, and aspire to simplicity of speech. No more perversion of sense, circumlocution, reticence, tergiversation! these things serve only to complicate and bewilder. Be men; speak the speech of honor. An hour of plain-dealing does more for the salvation of the world than ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... 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. ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... It was an impending doom which nothing but the direct interposition of Heaven could have at all averted; and it was not likely that any such perversion of the regular laws of nature would take place to save such a ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... 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 nature on ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... representations of two magnificently decorated harps played by priests. These have since generally been called "Bruce's Harpers." The instruments have been represented in many ways by different writers, the most curious perversion of the facts being found in Burney's "History of Music," where they have the ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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 reproach the Jews with "perverse and mad delusion" in having successively ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... entertaining to happen. I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life. We girls about made up our minds that we would get together a little fund and see if we couldn't do some missionary work in that neighbourhood—hire some real good artists"—Abner winced at this hideous perversion of the word—"hire some real good artists to go over there and let those poor creatures see what a first-class show was like; and ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... who only behold her from the sea. Here there was an exodus of passengers, and of luggage, and an invasion of natives with baskets of fruit. Vixen bought some grapes and peaches of a female native in a cap, whose patois was the funniest perversion of French and English imaginable. And then a bell rang clamorously, and there was a general stampede, and the gangway was pulled up and the vessel was steaming gaily towards Jersey; while Vixen sat eating grapes and looking dreamily skyward, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... from a narrow court not far from the open square in Clerkenwell, which is yet called, by some strange perversion of terms, 'The Green': when the Dodger made a sudden stop; and, laying his finger on his lip, drew his companions back again, with the ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... solemnities, many of which impress me as being exceedingly ludicrous. Strange as it may seem too, there is undoubtedly a degree of protection in the wig and gown - a dismissal of individual responsibility in dressing for the part - which encourages that insolent bearing and language, and that gross perversion of the office of a pleader for The Truth, so frequent in our courts of law. Still, I cannot help doubting whether America, in her desire to shake off the absurdities and abuses of the old system, may not have gone too far into the opposite extreme; and whether it is not desirable, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 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 feel I had only to wear the anchor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e., robbery; the commanders in the army pride themselves on victories, i.e., murder; and those in high places vaunt their power, i.e., violence? We do not see the perversion in the views of life held by these people, only because the circle formed by them is more extensive, and we ourselves are moving inside ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... 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 spring forth the very perfectible ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... perfect man been translated to another region, we cannot conceive his 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 ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... of it and sets workingman as an exploiting employer against workingman. The employers have changed in person; but labor, the only source of production, remains, as before, dependent upon the so-called wage—that is, the maintenance of existence. Under the influence of this law the perversion of conceptions is so great that, in our instance, even those workingmen stockholders not employed in the factory, instead of recognizing that they owe their dividends to the labor of the workmen who are employed, and accordingly that it is they who ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... ordinary prisoner might have submitted with amiable resignation to the disciplinary methods which, to the oblique vision of Sir Hudson Lowe, seemed to be necessary, but to treat the Emperor as though he were in that category was a perversion of all decency, and no one but a Hudson Lowe would have attempted it. It is quite certain that the dethroned arbiter of Europe never, in his most exalted period, treated any of his subordinates with such airs of majesty as St. Helena's Governor ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... 'Mr. Meech's perversion from Mongolia to China is much to be deplored. I think it would be wrong in me not to inform you of the true state of matters, and to remind you that it is little short of nonsense to speak of reopening the Mongolian Mission so long as ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... prints in Fox's Book of Martyrs; upon inquisitorial tortures, the very thought of which—even out of doors in the pleasant spring sunshine—made him break into a heavy sweat, and which, by some grotesque perversion of ideas, he believed to be not only the necessary outcome of, but vitally essential to, the practice of the Faith. Against this hideous background he set the calm and stately figure of his beloved friend Iglesias—seeing him no longer as the faithful comrade ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... any such perversion or inaccuracy in the cautious course of reasoning which has assisted me to ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... misapplication, perversion, profanation, desecration; injury, maltreatment, mistreatment, outrage, offense; invective, contumely, reproach, scurrility, opprobrium, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the son of that Dudley, minister to Henry VII., who, having, by rapine, extortion, and perversion of law, incurred the hatred of the public, had been sacrificed to popular animosity in the beginning of the subsequent reign. The late king, sensible of the iniquity, at least illegality, of the sentence, had afterwards restored ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... be found insufficient for his debts. Who would be guardian to a penniless infant? He resolved, therefore, to send his child from his roof to some place where, if reared humbly, it might at least be brought up in the right faith,—some place which might defy the search and be beyond the perversion of the unbelieving mother. He looked round, and discovered no instrument for his purpose that seemed so ready as Walter Ardworth; for by this time he had thoroughly excited the pity and touched the heart ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who come from down-town glad of a cup of tea and a chat and rest between work and dinner. The sight of a pretty girl making tea is always dear to the masculine heart. Many of our young lawyers, brokers, and gay men of the hunt like a cup of hot tea at five o'clock. The mistake was in the perversion of the idea, the making it the occasion for the official presentation of a daughter, or the excuse for other and more elaborate entertainments. So, although many a house is opened this winter at the same convenient hour, and with perhaps ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... religion would be neither more nor less than an 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 of language. ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... to be legal, and the other perfectly illegal, and which has a name exactly expressing it in the manner our language does. It is necessary that your Lordships should see that Mr. Hastings has made use of a perversion of the names of authorized gifts to cover the most abominable and prostituted bribery. The first of those presents is known in the country by the name of peshcush: this peshcush is a fine paid, upon the grant of lands, to the sovereign, or whoever grants them. The second is the nuzzer, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... so horribly that the form and face of the man hardly left any memory of themselves except the memory of the squint. His dark hair, his one perfect eye, his good figure, his expressive mouth, were all lost in that dreadful perversion of vision. It was a misfortune so great as to justify him in demanding that he should be judged by different laws than those which are used as to the conduct of the world at large. In getting a wife he might surely use his tongue with more freedom ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... must oppose whatever they themselves do not originate;—and, others again, have no doubt been led honestly to entertain a distrust which has finally grown into an opposition, through the influence of misrepresentations, or from a perversion of facts by those whose interests, from some cause, are at ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... that could easily be misapprehended, appeared to sustain the suggestion that he did not realise the critical juncture of affairs. But the assertion that he predicted the "war will be over in sixty days" was a ridiculous perversion of his words. No war existed at that time, and his "sixty suns" plainly referred to the sixty days that must elapse before Lincoln's inauguration. Nevertheless, the "sixty days prediction," as it was called, was repeated ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... exalted position, and unlimited wealth—megalomania. The exaltation is universal, and the patient may maintain at one and the same time that he is running a theatrical company, that he is the Prince of Wales, and that he is the Almighty. Moral perversion is a common symptom, and the patient is often guilty of criminal assaults, indecent exposures, bigamous marriages, and the like. It is accompanied with progressive bodily and mental decay. Women are comparatively rarely affected by it, and it generally ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... gross perversion of the design of Christ's gospel reached Bunyan in prison, and its popularity grieved his spirit. At length, on the 13th of the 11th Month (February), a copy of the book was brought to him; and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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 passage of the report which he so often appeals to. He therefore ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... been nourished by such idle praise, how few have been awakened to a just sense of the deep responsibility which rests upon us, for the faithful improvement of this talent, and our consequent accountability for its neglect or perversion! ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... 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 ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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 of the users are utterly thoughtless ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... great potential 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 never forget this grand basic ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a perversion in which a person is attracted not to persons of the opposite but to persons of the same sex. Thus a homosexual man does not care for women, but is attracted to men. A homosexual woman is not attracted to men; she only cares for ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... man is to adore God and to love what is god-like in man. The office of the tongue is to bless. Slander is guilty because it contradicts this; yet even in slander itself, perversion as it is, the interest of man in man is still distinguishable. What is it but perverted interest which makes the acts, and words, and thoughts of his brethren, even in their evil, a matter of such strange delight? Remember therefore, this contradicts ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... Suitable surroundings and treatment would here consist of the presence of good models and high ideals, sympathetic help in resisting temptation, and not in a harsh denunciation of each unapproved act as evidence of turpitude and perversion. You need not assume that there is perversion until that is demonstrated beyond any doubt. For, if the child is morally redeemable, he should be treated like one who is weak and who needs help until ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... 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 accusations of the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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 subtracting ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... of things did not always obtain. The conical movement of the earth's axis (now known by a curious perversion of phrase as "precession") will in the course of 13,000 years or so cause the tilt to be precisely opposite, and then we shall have the more extreme winters and summers instead of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... there were still some men who had retained sentiments of honour and self-respect. They protested loudly against this perversion of justice, but their generous pleadings were stifled by the selfish declamations of Pizarro ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... shirt with a flat-pleated frill, a shabby black satin waistcoat, the trousers of a man of law, black spun silk stockings, and shoes tied with ribbon; a long black overcoat, cheap gloves, black, and worn for ten days, and a gold watch-chain—in every point the lower grade of magistrate known by a perversion ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... of the rights of independence and self-government, which himself had heretofore so much abused, and that in this contest he will wear down the maritime power of England to limitable and safe dimensions. So far, good. It cannot be denied, on the other hand, that his successful perversion of the force (committed to him for vindicating the rights and liberties of his country) to usurp its government, and to enchain it under an hereditary despotism, is of baneful effect in encouraging future usurpations, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... "It's shame! I am not sorry you should see what I feel. It will suggest to you, perhaps, that my heart has never been in this filthy contest. Let me assure you, at any rate, that it hasn't; that it has had nothing but scorn for the base perversion of my pride and my ambition. I could easily shed tears of joy at their return—the return of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... responsibilities, political convulsions, revolutions without end, ruins over which all forms of socialism and communism attempt to establish themselves; these are the evils which must necessarily flow from the perversion ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... state in any of the books of Moses, nor indeed in the Old Testament. For a reason for this extraordinary omission he may consult Warburton's "Divine Legation;"[94] whether satisfactory or not, no better has yet been assigned. I have therefore supposed it new to Cain, without, I hope, any perversion of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... action. They are less within than without the average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants, the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of "normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but rather ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... associations of hilarity, conviviality, and enjoyment. Drinking parties were protracted beyond the whole Sunday, having begun by a dinner on Saturday; imbecility and prostrate helplessness were a common result of these bright and jovial scenes; and by what perversion of language, or by what obliquity of sentiment, the notions of pleasure could be attached to scenes of such excess—to the nausea, the disgust of sated appetite, and the racking headache—it is not easy to explain. There were men of heads so hard, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... blest would that day be for rousing some who never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted with a perversion of nature in their own contracted sympathies and estimates; as great, and yet as natural in its development when once begun, as the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... his seed were the promises made, He saith not ' and to seeds,' (as of roomy) but as of one, ' and to thy seed,' which is Christ." Here is an argument which one would think too far-fetched, even for Paul; and it is built on a perversion of a passage from Genesis, which Paul, bold as he was in these matters, certainly would not have ventured, if he had not the most assured confidence in the blinking credulity of his Galatian converts. His argument in this place is drawn from the use of the word "seed" in the singular ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... confined in Paraguay. The mother's 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 ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... of "all that tenement or inn with its appurtenances, called Savage's inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop." This was evidently a case where the name of the host counted for more than the actual sign of the house, and the habit of speaking of Savage's Bell may easily have led to the perversion into Bell Savage, and thence to the Frenchified ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... least gratitude to Mr. S—- for the attention bestowed on her son, by some strange perversion of intellect she seems to regard him and us as his especial enemies. Last night she ordered us from his room, and declared that her 'precious bhoy was not going to die like a hathen, surrounded by a parcel of heretics;' and she sent off a man on horseback for the priest and for ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... men who fashioned them. Every maker strives toward perfection, the completest realization of his ideal within his power of execution. But the very shortcomings of his work are significant as expressive of what he felt and was groping after; they are so significant that by a curious perversion, machinery, which in our civilized day has supplanted the craftsman, tries by mechanical means to reproduce the roughness and supposed imperfections of hand work. Music is the consummate art, in which ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... civilized warfare? [Cheers.] We think we cannot. [Cheers.] The enemy, borrowing what I may, perhaps, for this purpose call a neutral flag from the vocabulary of diplomacy, describe these newly adopted measures by a grotesque and puerile perversion of language as a "blockade." [Laughter.] What is a blockade? A blockade consists in sealing up the war ports of a belligerent against sea-borne traffic by encircling their coasts with an impenetrable ring of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that just then found expression in California, through so many channels, did not seem to affect him in the least. He had his Christianity warm from the heart of the Son of God, and no caricature of its features or perversion of its spirit could bewilder him for a moment. He knew whom he had believed. None of these things moved him. O blessed mystery of God's mercy, that turns the night of heathen darkness into day, and makes the desert ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... suppose a peculiar conformation or activity in my own organs, or that the power which I possess may not, with suitable directions and by steady efforts, be obtained by others, but I will do nothing to facilitate the acquisition. It is by far, too liable to perversion for a good man to desire to possess it, or to ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... of this Commission was placed Sir William Parsons, the Surveyor-General, who had come into the kingdom in a menial situation, and had, through a long half century of guile and cruelty, contributed as much to the destruction of its inhabitants, by the perversion of law, as any armed conqueror could have done by the edge of the sword. Ulster being already applotted, and Munster undergoing the manipulation of the new Earl of Cork, there remained as a field for the Parsons Commission ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... portion of the neighbourhood! What a pernicious engine for the gratification of pride, scandal, envy, and malice! What an inquisition of the few bad by which to torment the many good! What a dagger in the hands of tolerated assassins! In short, what a perversion of reason, what a disease in the very bosom of society, what a lurking demon stationed at the threshold of every happy family, to blast and thwart the modest ambition of its amiable members! Doubtless, in and near Wandsworth, a mistaken constitution in the system of ballot renders a hundred ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... Zinoviev's—Apfelbaum, Sukhanov's—Gimmer, Kamenev's—Rosenfeld, Steklov's—Nakhamkis, and a number of others whose identity is not even always known. Trotzky's assertion that the Workmen's and Soldiers' Government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants is therefore nothing but a perversion of facts. ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... and even at the price of one unhappy child it is too much to pay. The teacher who feels that she is not suited to the work; who has constantly to hold herself and her temper under control; whose nerves are such that she cannot do justice to herself, whose sense of justice is capable of perversion on purely sentimental grounds; or who has lost—or never possessed—the gift of maintaining discipline, should promptly find another position. She is [33] earning her salary under false pretenses, and that alone condemns her. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... Jonathan, what really would happen if the Carpenter-preacher of Gallilee could and did visit some of our American churches. Would he be able to stand the vulgar show? Would he be able to listen in silence to the miserable perversion of his teachings by hired apologists of social wrong? Would he want to drive out the moneychangers and the Masters of Bread, to hurl at them his terrible thunderbolts of wrath and scorn? Would he ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Although this singular perversion of the natural instincts of maternity sometimes occurs among the pigs which are allowed to roam together in herds, it seems to be far more common in those conditions where the animals are confined ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... 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 ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... is no longer the duty of a privy councillor to seize the suspected volumes of an antiquarian, or plunder the papers of an ex-chief justice, whilst lying on his death-bed. Government licensers of the press are gone, whose infamous perversion of the writings of other lawyers will cause no future Hale to leave behind him orders expressly prohibiting the posthumous publication of his legal MSS., lest the sanctity of his name should be abused, to the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... expression—to "speak the truth about Miss KELLOGG as a prima donna." And while he sat with closed eyes during the third act, wondering whether he should believe the critics in the flesh, or their criticisms in the columns of their respective journals, he saw rehearsed before him a new operatic perversion of MACBETH, as unlike the original as even VERDI'S MACBETTO, and quite as inexplicable to the unsophisticated mind. And ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... was clear to her. He was a man, and he had looked at Kitty Tailleur, and his sympathies, like Mr. Lucy's, had suffered an abominable perversion. His judgment, like Mr. Lucy's, had surrendered to the horrible charm. She said to herself bitterly, that she could ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... 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 far from being a Brahmanic ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... I think that Dr. Newman meant? I found a preacher bidding Christians imitate, to some undefined point, the 'arts' of the basest of animals, and of men, and of the devil himself. I found him, by a strange perversion of Scripture, insinuating that St. Paul's conduct and manner were such as naturally to bring down on him the reputation of being a crafty deceiver. I found him—horrible to say it—even hinting the same of one greater than ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... thought, no one acquainted with current discussions will deny; the fact is indubitable. It is reviewed in the following pages with the constructive purpose of redeeming the idea of supernatural Religion from pernicious perversion, and of exhibiting it in its true spiritual significance. The once highly reputed calculations made to show how the earth's diurnal revolution could be imperceptibly stopped for Joshua's convenience, and the ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... corrects me very justly. Had I seen Archbishop Abbot's(313) Preface, with the outrageous flattery on, And lies of James I., I should certainly never have said, "Honest Abbot could not flatter!" I should have said, and do say, I never saw grosser perversion of truth. One can almost excuse the faults of James when his bishops were such base sycophants. What can a king think of human nature, when it produces such wretches? I am too impartial to prefer Puritans ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the sight of God and all the world they shall blush with shame before a young child who has lived according to this commandment, and shall have to confess that with their whole life they are not worthy to give it a drink of water? And it serves them right for their devilish perversion in treading God's commandment under foot that they must vainly torment themselves with works of their own device, and, in addition, have scorn and loss ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... show with what absurd perversion the forms and technicalities of law are applied to obstruct the purposes of justice, which they were designed to further, may find excellent examples in England. But leaving this allow me to ask whether ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... the while replying, He still thought best to leave intact the reasons On which my blame was founded! Thus, them, stands My motion unimpaired, convicting clearly Of dire perversion that capacity We formerly admired.— [Cries of "Oh, oh."] This minister Whose circumventions never circumvent, Whose coalitions fail to coalesce; This dab at secret treaties known to all, This ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... be remembered, expressed the idea that the higher animals repeat in their ontogeny the adult organisation of animals lower in the scale. Since Haeckel recognised clearly that a linear arrangement of the animal kingdom was a mere perversion of reality, and that a branching arrangement of groups more truly represented the real relations of animals to one another, he could not of course entertain the Meckel-Serres theory in its original form. But he accepted the main tenet of ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... have snapt under the strain: but this is idle theory; for it was as clear as daylight to me that they held a totally different doctrine, and that the High Church and Popish fancy is a superstitious perversion, based upon carnal inability to understand a strong spiritual metaphor. On the other hand, my brother's arguments that the Baptismal Service of the Church taught "spiritual regeneration" during the ordinance, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... discover the substantial purport, the real side of the divine idea, and to justify the so much despised reality of things; for Reason is the comprehension of the divine work. But as to what concerns the perversion, corruption, and ruin of religious, ethical, and moral purposes and states of society generally, it must be affirmed that, in their essence, these are infinite and eternal, but that the forms they assume may be of a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... personal good nature of course aside—only so far as they had something to say in her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience, twist of her life, would say most?—so possible was it even that complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... 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, in ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... by the wall awhile and watched; the sorrow of it all sank into us. There in the holiest place of all, according to their thinking, close to the emblems of deity, they had set this grievous perversion of the holy and the pure. Right on the topmost pinnacle of everything known as religious there they had enthroned it, and robed it in starlight and crowned it as queens are crowned. "Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!" "One thing have I desired of the Lord . . . to behold the fair ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... 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 ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... 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 of ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... 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 also ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... very passage our Lord is explaining the sense of Holy Writ; therefore, its true meaning is not left to the private interpretation of every chance reader. It is, therefore, a grave perversion of the sacred text to adduce these words in vindication of private interpretation of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... such exaltation and urging of one work above another cannot exist beside 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 regard ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... 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
... will ever be brought to submit to the authority of the Government of the United States. You are dealing with delusions, too, when you seek to separate our people from our Government, and to characterize the deliberate, Sovereign act of that people as a 'perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement.' If you cherish these dreams, you will be awakened from them, and find them as unreal and unsubstantial as others in ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... his brow pensively with his curved forefinger. It is to be feared that he was seeking not so much the truth as the most convenient perversion ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Gryphius, Besser of Flemming, Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even Francisci was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel. This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naive pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French Alexandrine ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... mention of this book perhaps led to a reference by Mr. Kingsley to the Unitarians of New England, of whom he spoke very kindly, adding, in effect, that their error was but a natural rebound from Calvinism, that dreary perversion of God's boundless love. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... another of the shanties I learnt as a boy from Blyth sailors, and which has never been printed before. I fancy that 'blackbird' and 'crew' must be a perversion of 'blackbird and crow,' as the latter figure of ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... while his successful speculation 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... 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 her battles ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... afterwards (1563) pub. the work on which his fame rests, the English version of the Acts and Monuments, better known as The Book Martyrs. Received with great favour by the Protestants, it was, and has always been, charged by the Roman Catholics with gross and wilful perversion of facts. The truth of the matter appears to be that while Foxe was not, as in the circumstances he could hardly have been, free from party spirit or from some degree of error as to facts, he did not intentionally try to mislead; and comparison of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... pleasure or pain, may be taken as the test of the goodness or badness of an action, the phraseology is so misleading, and so liable to frustrate the practical objects of the moralist, that it is desirable, if possible, to find terms not equally lending themselves to misinterpretation and perversion. Let us now, then, consider whether we are supplied with such terms in the phrases 'perfection' or 'development' of 'character.' It is a noble idea of human action to suppose that its end is the ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... these teas are liable to considerable perversion is evident from the manner in which Meister relates they are prepared. He says the leaves are put into a hot kettle just emptied of boiling water, and that they are kept in this closely covered until they are cold, when they are strewed upon the hot plates above mentioned for drying. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... Have not the same unpleasant things occurred in the Church at other times? Yet, because not classed under any sectarian name, there has been but a transient estimate placed upon them, and criticism has been merciless. Is not every good institution subject to perversion at any time? We believe Dorner to be correct, and that Spener was the veritable successor of Luther and Melanchthon. A recent author, who has shown a singular facility in grouping historical periods and discovering their great significance, says: "Pietism went back from the cold faith ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of justice and love, we may gladly reject it, saying that at least we will not believe that God gives us the power, on the one hand, to recognise our highest and truest instincts, and on the other directs us to outrage them. Such teaching as this we can infallibly recognise as a human perversion and not as a divine message; and we may thankfully and gratefully believe that the obstacles and difficulties, the temptations and troubles, which seem to be strewn so thickly in our path, are to develop rather than to thwart our strivings after good, and assuredly designed to minister to ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Inferni!" Who can hear it without the same thrill, as when Napoleonic trumpets heralded the Emperor! In the presence of such moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice Cult falls away. That romantic perversion of the sex instinct is but the psychic motive force. Once started on his splendid and terrible road, the poet forgets everything except the "Principle of Beauty" and the "Memory of Great Men." Parallel ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of tragedy, and bringing before us the appalling struggles of a proud, scornful, and repentant spirit." Not that she was exactly this. Edith's worst qualities are but the perversion of what should have been her best. A false education in her, and a tyrant passion in her husband, make them other than Nature meant; and both show how life may run its evil course ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... to threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun. God fights against death in every form, against the great death of the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness, misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who can deliver us "from the body of this death." This is the battle that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... watchword was "Liberty for Greeks!" The recent reverses of Athens had excited a feeling of contempt among her subjects, and led them greatly to under-estimate her real power; and Brasidas himself, by a not over-scrupulous perversion of facts, had been careful to encourage this belief. All these causes produced a burst of enthusiasm throughout Thrace, and if the Spartans had supported Brasidas with vigour, a general insurrection would have followed among the Athenian ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... regular order from the popular to the 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
... Hindustani, in which language it means a thing. Gipsies do not, however, seem to regard it themselves, as tacho or true Rommanis, despite this testimony, and I am inclined to think that it partly originated in some wag's perversion ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... powers of the woman to lead and to help, that the family is organized. In this great human family of ours the man and the woman in days that are coming will cooperate to remove from our midst the blackest and most fearful perversion of the natural powers of our race. We do not believe in sitting down idly before this problem and saying, "It has always been, it always will be." In this great day of moral and spiritual progress, with powers that we have inherited from our forefathers in this ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... north shore of this bay they would fall down nearly south more than 100 miles to Mars Hill, about 60 miles from the south shore of the Province, at the Bay of Passamaquoddy, which is part of the Bay of Fundy, and this point, too, of so little inclination that it is a palpable perversion of language to call it an angle, much more a ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... to the Collegio Romano. But let the reader mark how the Roman Church here, as everywhere else, contrives to keep up the show of educating, and takes care all the while to impart the smallest possible amount of knowledge,—constructs a machinery which, through some mischievous perversion, is without results. The Collegio Romano has a numerous staff of professors, who prelect on theology, logic, history, mathematics, natural philosophy, and other branches. This looks well; but observe its working. All the lectures are delivered ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... suggestions being taken seriously. Once having started the ball of doubt rolling he never let it stop for want of some neat strokes of his cunning pen. Several noteworthy instances of this form of literary diversion or perversion occur to me. There never was any occasion to doubt the authorship of "The Lost Sheep," which won for Sally Pratt McLean wide popular recognition a decade and a half ago. Its first stanza will recall it ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... sermons, in the first year of the reign of King James; and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years of his scholastic and collegiate life. Thus there was less danger to Tom of a perversion of his faith by the Director, who scarce ever saw him, than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the Vicar's company; but as long as Harry's religion was his Majesty's, and my lord's, and my lady's, the Doctor said gravely, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... came by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode's course up to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the best use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion. Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness, had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's words—"Do you call these bare events? The Lord pity you!" The events were comparatively small, but the essential condition was there—namely, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of words—and her eyes blazing, with that look in them as though she saw nothing but the scenes of her own imagination. She talked of devotion—and of forgetting herself in other people. I could only tell her, of course, that all this sounded to me the most grotesque sophistry and perversion. She was forgetting her first duty, breaking her marriage vow, and tearing your life asunder. She shook her head, and said you would soon forget her. 'If he had loved me he would never have left me!' she said, again and again, with a passion ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order—of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or, in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste. Next, he is a member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly, he is a member of his family. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... do duty in silver to support a heavy cup or vase, is a very disagreeable thing to contemplate; if the article were really what it represented, it would break under the strain. While there should be no deliberate perversion of Nature's forms, there should be ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... underrated in his own day, exemplifies this principle in the literary character. That pleasing writer, without any perversion of intellect or inflation of vanity, might have contrasted his powers with those of JOHNSON, and might, according to his own ideas, have considered himself as not inferior to his more celebrated and ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... 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, and that he who has denied Christ should not appeal for mercy to the same Christ whom he has denied; ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... 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 his ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... and will speak no word of Malay to one another; and it is considered that they are more likely to be successful if they confine themselves to the use of a peculiar language which seems to be a conventional perversion of the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... architecture of some of the round-towered churches in Norfolk and Suffolk,[59] where the windows are formed with heads of this shape. Antiquaries, unwilling to admit that the flat-sided arch, as it has been called by a perversion of terms, was introduced into England prior to the fourteenth century, have labored to prove that such windows were alterations of that period, contrary to the evidence of ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... thought dutiful, in military officers, to treat the orders of their commander-in-chief as we do the command of our Master; or in mercantile agents, to interpret thus loosely the instructions of their employers? The perversion, however, has become so familiar to us, that we are insensible of it; and the fact may be numbered among other wonders of a like kind, which the experience of a few past years has exhibited. A few years since, good men were in the use of intoxicating drinks without ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... 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 ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... services and festivals, and its discipline were all designed with that object. And it is all these which popery has perverted; popery, whether in the Roman church or in the Greek church, or even in the Protestant church, for it has existed more or less in all. But even in the Roman church, where the perversion has been most complete, it has comparatively affected but little the truths of the Christian religion; all the great doctrines, which I mentioned, are held as by ourselves; the three creeds, the Apostles' creed, the Nicene, and the Athanasian, are used by the Roman church ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... the girl, who was pure and virtuous; told her she was not legally married, and that the laws of her country thought ill of her. Finally, he appealed to her love for her husband, and showed her that she was standing in his way. He was not a bad man, but he loved his son beyond truth and to the perversion of honour, and was ready to sacrifice the woman who stood between them. She allowed herself to be sacrificed. She wiped herself out that she might not be an obstacle to her husband. She drowned herself in ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... belong to the subject. The divine mind contemplates sin in its principle; and the least transgression, being a resistance of his command, an insult to his authority, an opposition to his truth, a violation, of general order, a perversion and misuse of the noblest faculties, whatever may be the force of the attack or the nature of the temptation, is infinitely offensive to the blessed God. It is an admission of that principle which, could it possibly prevail, would ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... foul cisterns, has been led into narrow channels, has been made stagnant in desolate pools and wide-spread weedy marshes. The doctrine of Christ has had thus far in the world but very few hearers who have understood it. Many a modern creed might well go back to heathenism for improvement. This perversion of Christianity is a chief element in the difficulty of tracing the real influence of true Christian teaching upon character. It is this which compels us to draw a parallel, not so much between the actual characters of ancient and modern times, if we would rightly understand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... pignoratio. And so far has this gone that neighbours club together and transfer their claims to some one person who "pignorates" for the whole of them, thus in fact compelling a man to pay a debt to an entire stranger—a monstrous perversion of all the rules of law, which separates so delicately between the rights even of near relations, and will not allow the son to be sued for the father's debts unless he is the heir, nor the wife for the husband's unless she has succeeded to the estate. Hitherto our ignorance ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... the platform of the Restrictionist. It cannot—except by perversion of truth—be regarded as antivivisection, for there is not a single society in England or America, devoted to the interests of that cause, which would acknowledge these views as in any way representative of its ideals; but it is the expression of sentiments which formerly were almost universally ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... perversity, and gullible almost to sublimity, uncritical even for an eminently uncritical age, accepting and retailing any and every monstrous invention, the more readily apparently in proportion to its monstrosity. For all that—despite his prejudices, despite even his often deliberate perversion of the truth, it is difficult to avoid a certain kindliness for him. To the literary student he is indeed a captivating figure. With his half-Welsh, half-Norman blood; with the nimble, excitable, distinctly Celtic ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... on the contrary, are positively noxious to society, as well particular as general. There is a twofold or threefold iniquity in their goings-on; they sin against society, their families, and themselves; the whole business of their lives is a perversion of the text of Scripture, which commandeth us, "in whatever station we are, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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
... Neville 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 of a colonial acquaintance ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne |
