"Pervert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their own supreme law. They have written for this Mastership a constitution, designed for the sole purpose of accomplishing the liquidation of the Masterly class and race. They have endeavored to force this planetary constitution upon us by threats of force, and by a shameful attempt to pervert the fidelity of our chief-slaves—I will not insult these loyal servitors with this disgusting new name, freedmen—so that we might, a second time, be tricked into voting assent to our own undoing. But in this, they have failed. Our chief-slaves have warned us of the trap concealed in this ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... a great lake full of flaming mire in which were certain men that pervert righteousness, and tormenting angels ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... when applied to faith, and that seldom, are laudable; but when they are drawn from the life and conversation, they are dangerous, and, when men make too many of them, pervert the doctrine of faith. Allegories are fine ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... been remitted in the Sacrament, by which believers are born again; but it remains, because it produces desires against which believers contend. Our adversaries know that Luther believes and teaches thus, and while they cannot reject the matter, they nevertheless pervert his words, in order by this artifice to ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... of justice. But when it is considered that the parties are liable to differ in their intellectual capacities, and that one, or the other, or both, are undoubtedly under the influence of such passions as rivalry, hatred, avarice, and ambition. passions that are nearly certain to pervert their judgments, and very likely to corrupt their motives, all probabilities founded upon a mere numerical majority, in one party, or the other, vanish at once; and the decision of the majority becomes, to all practical ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... his death,[25] because his step-mother was believed: because Cassandra was not believed, Troy fell. Therefore, we ought to examine strictly into the truth of a matter, rather than {suffer} an erroneous impression to pervert our judgment. But, that I may not weaken {this truth} by referring to fabulous antiquity, I will relate to you a thing that happened within ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... naturally and without irritation preserve. I've seen these heroic attempts come to grief so often; in fact, I don't think I've ever seen one succeed, not even between blood relations. In the long run they merely pervert and spoil the fibre of the attempter, without really benefiting the attemptee. Behind healthy relationships between human beings, or even between human beings and animals, there must be at least some rudimentary ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... characterized this nation. War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert even the natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in an hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very names of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity whilst we agreed, become ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... approval unequaled by any other athletic sport. While the game has advanced with marvelous rapidity it has experienced short periods of depression and stagnation during its career of thirty years. It has had enemies who have sought to pervert it for their own uses. It has been all but torn asunder by civil war. But each time it has bravely met the issue and in the end triumphed. It is just now recovering from the effects of a civil war ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... to many the longest part of life, and to almost all the most innocent and happy, is yet unthankfully neglected, except by those who pervert ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... henceforth allowed the good little girl more liberty than formerly; and often calmed her husband, when he came to search for the child; which for some time he was wont to do, as her retiredness did not please him, and he feared that, in the end, it might make her silly, or even pervert her understanding. The mother often glided to the chink; and almost always found the bright Elf beside her child, employed in sport, or ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... practical importance. The "mystery of iniquity" in Paul's time, and since his day, did not, and does not, consist in making too much of God's ordinances in their purity and proper use. That cannot be done, any more than you can intelligently love the Bible too much, or the Sabbath. But, to pervert them, or to make additions to them, or to rely upon them wholly, is Romanism. But can men make too much of having a seal on a deed? Is the deed good for anything without the seal? Can they make too much of having three witnesses to their wills? Those ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... provisions, contriving by his consummate address to reconcile the most conflicting interests and parties. Although the idol of the army and of the people, there is not the slightest evidence of an attempt to pervert his popularity to an unworthy purpose. There is no appearance of his having been corrupted, or even dazzled, by the splendid offers repeatedly made him by the different potentates of Europe. On the contrary, the proud answer recorded of him, to Pope Julius the Second, breathes a spirit of determined ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... Savonarola described, and as we read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is suffered to stand between their lust and its accomplishment. They override the law by violence, or pervert its ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... to Wilmot's judgment; but just before he had dilated with vast perspicacity on the tendency of governors to act in behalf of the colonists, to forget imperial interests, to misapply the funds and pervert the labor belonging to the crown. The precision of his injunctions left no alternative but to obey. Had Wilmot at once declared the impracticability of Lord Stanley's schemes he might have been recalled, but the responsibility ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... Much of this, with some softening, might, we fear, be applied to Bacon. The influence of Waller's talents, manners, and accomplishments, died with him; and the world has pronounced an unbiassed sentence on his character. A few flowing lines are not bribe sufficient to pervert the judgment of posterity. But the influence of Bacon is felt and will long be felt over the whole civilised world. Leniently as he was treated by his contemporaries, posterity has treated him more leniently still. Turn ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in a Christian land must expect to be governed, or to be held infamous forever. Nay, more: he does not recognize at all those fundamental principles of the Constitution and Declaration which are stated in plain terms in the first lines of both. He did worse than torture and pervert language: he reversed its meaning. He denied the undoubted facts of history. He denied the settled truths of science. He slandered the memory of the founders of the government and framers of the Declaration. He was ready to cover the most glorious page of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... nation. We have 'hoisted the mainsail' of the ship of state and started her about the world. While heeding Washington's warnings and the popular interpretation of the Monroe doctrine to keep the people of other nations from getting a foothold on this continent, we shall not pervert their spirit by stubbornly refusing to improve an opportunity to extend and increase our power and our commerce. Every extension of our territory hitherto made has been resisted by a spirit the same in essence as that ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... require the supposition of a change of subjects, and the Judaisers with whom the Apostle waged a neverending warfare, never did evangelistic work amongst the heathen as these men seem to have done, but confined themselves to trying to pervert converts already made. It was not their message but their spirit that was faulty. With whatever purpose of annoyance they were animated, they did 'preach Christ,' and Paul superbly brushes aside all that was antagonistic to him personally, in his triumphant recognition that the one thing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... all that is offered to our belief, and test it by the faculties with which the great God has endowed us. These rare senses and powers of reasoning were given to be used freely, but not audaciously, to discover, not to pervert the truth. Why were so many things presented as through a veil, unless to stimulate our efforts to clear away the veil, and penetrate to the light? I think it is plain that St. Paul, while he calls upon us to believe, never intended ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... re-arrested. But while he was absent at the land sales at Fort Leavenworth, Judge Lecompte a second time set this wretch at liberty. Mr. Geary was provoked beyond endurance, and wrote to the President that he would not remain in office and allow such a scoundrel to be kept in a position to pervert the ways of justice. President Pierce nominated C. O. Harrison, of Kentucky, to take Lecompte's place, but for some unexplained cause the appointment was not confirmed in the Senate, and Judge Lecompte retained ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... whose motive to this study is nothing better, and who have the further disadvantage of becoming a nuisance very often to society, in proportion to the progress they make. The former do not improve their reading to any good purpose; the latter pervert it to a very bad one, and grow in impertinence as they increase in learning. I think I have known most of the first kind in England, and most of the last in France. The persons I mean are those who read to talk, to shine in conversation, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... of Peggy. It might be that the rancour she displayed was partly in consequence of an adequate retribution having failed to overtake her betrayer, and the family, then resident at Waddow, not having dealt out to him the just punishment of his deserts. Thus had she been permitted to pervert the proper influences and benevolent operations of this mystic disturber to her own mischievous propensities; and thenceforth a malignant spirit troubled the house, heretofore guarded by a saint of true Catholic ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage. If momentary rays of glory break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time admonish us to lament that the vices of government should pervert the direction and tarnish the lustre of those bright talents and exalted endowments for which the favored soils that produced them have been so justly celebrated. From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism ...
— The Federalist Papers
... voice confidentially, "can talk of nothing else. When he was staying with us he was for ever telegraphing, cabling to America, or decoding messages. There was no peace in the house, by day or by night. Finally I made a stand. 'Gregory,' I said, 'you shall not pervert my servants with your odious tips, and turn my home into a public stock-exchange. Take your bulls and bears over to the Savoy and play with them there, and leave Doris to me.' And he did!" ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... the world more amiable and finished than the rest of her works; so I would have them bestow upon themselves all the additional beauties that art can supply them with; provided it does not interfere with disguise, or pervert ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... nature of the case. But though the opinions of the generality of mankind, when not dependent on mere habit and inculcation, have their root much more in the inclinations than in the intellect, it is a necessary condition to the triumph of the moral bias that it should first pervert the understanding. Every erroneous inference, though originating in moral causes, involves the intellectual operation of admitting insufficient evidence as sufficient; and whoever was on his guard against all kinds of inconclusive evidence which can be mistaken for ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... but with all my soul I deny the fantastic superstition that our rule can benefit a people like this, a nation of one race, as different from ourselves as dark from light—in colour, religion, every mortal thing. We can only pervert their natural instincts. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... deny, Be his who willed the prince should fly. When weapons clash and heroes bleed, With elephant and harnessed steed, Ne'er, like the good, be his to fight Whose heart allowed the prince's flight. Though taught with care by one expert May he the Veda's text pervert, With impious mind on evil bent, Whose voice approved the banishment. May he with traitor lips reveal Whate'er he promised to conceal, And bruit abroad his friend's offence, Betrayed by generous confidence. No wife of equal lineage born The wretch's joyless home adorn: ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... would be admitted to power, erect, independent, unsullied; but by means which corrupt the virtue of many, and in some degree diminish the authority of all. Could any system be devised, better fitted to pervert the principles and break the spirit of men formed to be the glory of their country? And, can we mention no instance in which this system has made such men useless, or worse than useless, to the country of which their talents were the ornament, and might, in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Philistines, as not to believe that the red men were the lost tribes, and that Peter, in particular, was not especially and elaborately described in the Old Testament. He had become so thoroughly possessed by this crotchet as to pervert everything that he saw, read, or heard, into evidence, of some sort or other, of the truth of his notions. In this respect there was nothing peculiar in the good missionary's weakness, it being a failing common ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... "You came here to pervert the exhortation of Karl Marx, and unite under the banner of envy and greed every ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... insuperable, and darkness which no luminary of learning has hitherto been able to dissipate. I have established the truth of the Mosaical account, by evidence which no transcription can corrupt, no negligence can lose, and no interest can pervert. I have shewn that the universe bears witness to the inspiration of its historian, by the revolution of its orbs and the succession of its seasons; that the stars in their courses fight against[1083] incredulity, that the works of GOD give hourly confirmation to the law, the prophets, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of tortur'd ghosts, Pursue thee still, and fill thy amaz'd ears With cold astonishment and horrid fears! O, how these senses muffle Common Sense! And more and more with pleasing objects strive To dull his judgment and pervert his will To their behests: who, were he not so wrapp'd I'the dusky clouds of their dark policies, Would never suffer right to suffer wrong. Fie, Lingua, wilt thou now degenerate? Art not a woman? dost not love revenge? Delightful speeches, sweet persuasions, I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... to his keenly appreciating auditory, made proclamation among them, that the Demon who should invent a new vice, which, under the name and guise of Pastime, should be best calculated to seduce men from the paths of virtue, pervert their hearts, ruin them for earth and educate them for hell, should be awarded a crown of honor, with rank and prerogative second only to his own. He then, with many a gracious and encouraging word to incite in them a spirit of emulation, and nerve them for exertion in the important ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... be as ready to do that as to eat an apple. That is my religion, and I feel that our platter is pretty near clean of some things, and we calculate to keep it clean from this time henceforth and forever .... And if men and women will not live their religion, but take a course to pervert the hearts of the righteous, we will 'lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet,' and we will let you know that the earth can swallow you up as did Koran with his hosts; and, as Brother Taylor says, you may dig your graves, and we will slay you and ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... feeling of the soul's sensitiveness, the thoughtful man is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of little moment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye of the soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, in consequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spurious consecration, or the world in its blindness may have come to honour them, they are in fact laden with ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... in the courtier's art of reading the thoughts of men, saw symptoms of yielding in the face of his prisoner, and pushed his advantage. He had appealed to Zarah's instincts, now he attempted to dazzle and pervert her reason. With subtle sophistry he brought forward arguments with which his mind was but too familiar. Pollux spoke of necessity, that artful plea of the tempter, who would try to make the Deity Himself answerable for the sin of His creatures, as having placed them under circumstances where ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... it is very important to forbid these offices to persons who are under obligations, which induce an insatiable greed and presumption; and, to fill that yawning void, the wealth of all the Indias is insignificant. The worst is, that they pervert a man, and lead him astray by their influence. If I were to recount here in detail all the difficulties which they occasion, I should have to take twice the space. In short, everyone there is lamenting; and these people come ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... consequences, was the great rule of action. I grant it; yet, notwithstanding, I refuse to stigmatize, as many have done, those men who have committed the fault of hesitating; I feel that to rank them among the champions of slavery is to pervert facts, and to fall into a blamable exaggeration. Again, to-day, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, cannot citizens be cited in the North who are devoted to the cause of the negroes, but who refuse to participate in abolitionist demonstrations, because they fear (and the sentiments does them ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... journalist," the man had continued, "is to destroy the truth, to lie, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, to sell his soul for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks. They pull the strings and we dance. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... to the Havre Company has ever been so great as that of its late President, Mr. Mortimer Livingston. An honorable and just man in his dealings, both with individuals and the Government, he eschewed every attempt by which some sought to pervert and deprave the legislation of the country, and presented all of his views in steamshipping on high, honorable, and tenable grounds. He pursued the profession in an enlarged spirit of enterprise, and was not unmindful of his duties to his country, while he endeavored ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... not change these foolish sentiments? Would you pervert us? Will you not convert yourself? Lords! you perceive now very clearly what an obstinate fellow this is! Therefore let him be stripped and put into a great caldron of boiling oil. Let him ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of it seriously, they would see that this is so bad a mistake, so contrary to good sense, so opposed to decency and so removed in every respect from that good breeding which they seek, that they would be more likely to correct than to pervert those who had an inclination to follow them. And indeed, make them give an account of their opinions, and of the reasons which they have for doubting religion, and they will say to you things so feeble and so petty, that they will ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... strong arm at the service of the infidels—it is but yesterday; but I, I, the shepherd of my flock, will not suffer that he who is the highest in rank, the richest in possessions, the most powerful by the mere dignity of his name, shall pervert thousands of the Jacobite brethren. I have the will and the power too, to close the sluice gates against such a disaster. Obey me, or you shall rue it with tears ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... {298} and therefore the conclusion naturally follows, that the author also took the divine days of creation as such earthly days of twenty-four hours. A simple reference of the same to periods, so that we should again think of fixed periods of the earth or of the world, would especially pervert the literal sense—would entirely remove from the account the idea of "day" which is so essential to the author of the record, and thereby render obscure the archetype of the divine week of creation for the human divisions of time; and the looked-for harmony ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... astonished Mandarin, looking around the room as though to discover in what crevice the unheard-of attributes were hidden. "This person's weaknesses? Can the sounding properties of this ill-constructed roof thus pervert one word into the semblance of another? If not, the bounds set to the admissible from the taker-down of the spoken word, Ming-shu, do not in their most elastic moods extend to calumny and distortion. . . . The one before you has ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... under Nabonidus, and all other decadent races threatened by ruin, they attributed their decline, not to their own vices, but to the machinations of an angry god, and they looked on favours granted to strangers as a sacrilege. Had not the Greeks brought their divinities with them? Did they not pervert the simple country-folk, so that they associated the Greek religion with that of their own country? Money was scarce; Amasis had been obliged to debit the rations and pay of his mercenaries to the accounts of the most venerated Egyptian temples—those of Sais, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to direct immigration to the Northern section; and with the increase of its preponderance appeared more and more distinctly a tendency in the Federal Government to pervert functions delegated to it, and to use them with ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... worth, nor credibility. Some teach only a very small portion of Christianity, and the portion they teach they often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed to be a part of the Bible. All the missionaries work up their French on it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel. It is the greatest story that was ever written about ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ensued; and Edwin raised his eyes In tears, for grief lay heavy at his heart. "And is it thus in courtly life," he cries, "That man to man acts a betrayer's part? And dares he thus the gifts of Heaven pervert, Each social instinct, and sublime desire? Hail, Poverty! if honour, wealth, and art, If what the great pursue and learn'd admire, Thus dissipate and quench the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... their end and aim, not the individual at all, but society as a whole, and the life of generations that are to come. He is bigger than he knows. Although he may have no notion why he feels and acts as he does, and although he may pervert the purpose for his own selfish end, he is continually being moved by the mighty impulse of the race-life, an impulse which often outrivals the desire I or his own personal existence. The craving to reproduce ourselves and the craving to cherish and ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... withstood him, and desired to turn away the Deputy Sergius from the faith; "O," said he, stirred with a holy zeal and indignation, "thou full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?" The same spirit which enabled him to inflict a sore punishment on that wicked wretch, did prompt him to use that sharp language towards him; unquestionably deserved, and seasonably pronounced. ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... of education, is this development of the powers of so-called self-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulating his self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do is to pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, making him affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The moment the least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-by to everything ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to the men. They were regular Caste Hindus; courteous—for they have had no cause to fear the power of the Gospel—yet keen and argumentative. One of them had evidently read a good deal. He quoted from their classics; knew all about Mrs. Besant and the latest pervert to her views; and was up in the bewildering tangle of thought known as Hindu Philosophy. "Fog-wreaths of doubt, in blinding eddies drifted"—that is what it really is, but it is very difficult ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... popular talents, of figure and fortune in the world, and without the advantages of apparent disinterestedness on their side, will allways have address enough, with a seeming plausibility, to pervert every act of Government at home, and to defame and run down every publick transaction abroad; and disciples will never be wanting of capacity and passions fitted to become the dupes of such false apostles. The corruption complained of is but too universal, and it's to be feared too ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... immediately countered with exhortations against the awful sin of murder, and rebuked the blasphemy of the Regicides, who, to defend their own infamy, would wrest Scripture from its meaning. 'Did you not, O monster of impiety,' mimicked Hind in the preacher's own voice, 'pervert for your own advantage the words of the Psalmist, who said, "Bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron"? Moreover, was it not Solomon who wrote: "Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry"? ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... distance of Frost. I should probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. "I am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, "but I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing a moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of course, that there are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling them either moral or religious, ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... unfortunate beings cannot be consigned to ordinary prisons, since, owing to their state of mental alienation, they do not possess even the modesty of the vicious—hypocrisy—and they never fail to pervert those criminaloids with whom they come in contact. Malcontents by nature, they distrust everybody and everything, and as they see an enemy in every warder and official, they are the centres ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black.' He had unchanging faith in self-government. 'The people,' he said, 'are the rightful masters of both congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.' Yielding and accommodating in non-essentials, he was inflexibly firm in a principle or position deliberately taken. 'Let us have faith that right makes might,' he said, 'and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... soon see the courtiers of the king succeed the present men; the children of foreigners will, for the future, fill the parliament, and the private interest of their patron will guide their venal votes." "What an act of oppression," rejoined the monks, "to pervert to other objects the pious designs of our holy institutions, to contemn the inviolable wishes of the dead, and to take that which a devout charity had deposited in our chests for the relief of the unfortunate and make it subservient to the luxury of the bishops, thus ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it is to be lamented, that mothers who are inclined to piety, should pervert even the means of salvation to their destruction—commit the greatest irregularities while apparently pursuing that which should produce the most regular and ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... subject, and to show how many persons strive to pervert praiseworthy enterprises, I will instance again the people of St. Malo and others, who say that the profit of these discoveries belongs to them, since Jacques Cartier, who first visited Canada and the islands of New Foundland, was from their city, as if ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... place for the practice of the heathenish games of strength, where men fought naked. Antiochus was but too glad of the offer; so the good High Priest was carried off to die a prisoner at Antioch, and the apostate was set up in his room in order to pervert the Jewish youth to idolatry. However, he was soon overthrown by his apostate brother, Menelaus, whom he had sent to pay the tribute at Antioch, and who, when there, promised the king a larger revenue, and to bring all the Jews to embrace the heathen worship. Jason fled to the Ammonites, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural taste, and their origin ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... proceed with relentless persistency and profound cunning to instil into the nation the demoniacal obsession of power-worship and world-dominion, to modify and pervert the mentality—indeed the very fibre and moral substance—of the German people, a people which until misled, corrupted and systematically poisoned by the Prussian ruling caste, was and deserved to be an honoured, valued and welcome member ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... say that, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "as thou sawest her in the full perfection of her beauty; for the enchantment does not go so far as to pervert thy vision or hide her loveliness from thee; against me alone and against my eyes is the strength of its venom directed. Nevertheless, there is one thing which has occurred to me, and that is that thou didst ill describe her beauty to me, for, as ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... have entered the minds of those only who snatch at the former that they may conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants may refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body after labor of brain; they do not help it—not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff—or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the few at all eminent, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... to be proud, vain, ambitious, and disdainful: He was jealous of his Equals, and despised all merit but his own: He was implacable when offended, and cruel in his revenge. Still in spite of the pains taken to pervert them, his natural good qualities would occasionally break through the gloom ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... prettily written tale, many young ladies will weep: and though without the faintest intention of imitating your hero's behaviour, they will think that it would be a fine thing if they did so. And it is a great mischief to pervert the moral judgment and falsely to excite the moral feelings. You forget that wrong is wrong, though it be done against yourself, and that you have no right to acquit the wrong to yourself as though it were ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... think it very absurd. Common custom is the standard of propriety in language. And for any man to affect speaking improperly is to pervert the use of speech, and can never serve to a better purpose than to protract and multiply disputes, where there ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... will then be fulfilling our legitimate duties. Yet, it so happens that we too know a few characters. But, as we can read, it behoves us to choose no other than wholesome works; for these will do us no harm! What are most to be shirked are those low books, as, when once they pervert the disposition, there remains ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... easily, and with one stroke of his compass, he might describe or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a circle or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art: yet this rule of his he doth some- times pervert, to acquaint the world with his preroga- tive, lest the arrogancy of our reason should question his power, and conclude he could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... pervert whom I can trust told me that he had made advances to upward of one hundred men in the course of the last fourteen years, and that he had only once met with a refusal (in which case the man later on offered himself spontaneously) and only once ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... impose on or oppress, ruin, damage, upon, persecute, slander, defame, injure, pervert, victimize, defile, malign, prostitute, vilify, disparage, maltreat, rail at, violate, harm, misemploy, ravish, vituperate, ill-treat, misuse, reproach, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... accurately expressed the conviction in my mind. The narrative related by Ambrose had all the appearance, in my eyes, of a fabricated story, got up, and clumsily got up, to pervert the plain meaning of the circumstantial evidence produced by the prosecution. I reached this conclusion reluctantly and regretfully, for Naomi's sake. I said all I could say to shake the absolute confidence which she felt in the discharge of the ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... spectacle, a public breakfast which took place on the second of October. Though none of the Royal Family appeared at it, it was no less injurious to their interests than the former. The enemies of the Crown spread reports all over Paris, that the King and Queen had manoeuvred to pervert the minds of the troops so far as to make them declare against the measures of the National Assembly. It is not likely that the Assembly, or politics, were even spoken of at the breakfast; but the report did as much mischief as the reality would have done. This ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... enlightened book-mongers their St. Paul, either by threats, revilings, force, violence, fire, and faggot, we shall not be able to hook in any more of them to nibble at below. He dines commonly on counsellors, mischief-mongers, multipliers of lawsuits, such as wrest and pervert right and law and grind and fleece the poor; he never fears to want any of these. But who can endure to be wedded ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... without religion as a sanction of right conduct. The boy needs God, a God to whom he can pray in the hour of temptation. He needs to regard his life with all its powers as God's investment, which he must not squander or pervert. ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... some years ago to become a pirate. I had been deceived—shamefully deceived and wronged—by wealthy and powerful men. I had appealed to the law of my country, and the law refused to right me. No, not the law, but those who sat on the judgment-seat to pervert the law. It matters not now; I was driven mad at the time, for the wrong done was not done so much to me as to those whom I loved. I vowed that I ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... always will superstition, on the one hand, and infidelity, on the other, reject and despise the blessed revelation of forgiveness for sinners through Jesus, the Lamb of God. Not always will cold philosophy, and erratic enthusiasm, and fanaticism fierce and malignant, conspire to corrupt and pervert the gospel itself, turning even the streams from the fountain of life into waters of bitterness and poison. No, no; the time will come when the sun, in his daily journey round the renovated world, shall waken with his morning beam in every human dwelling the voice ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of Deception and Hypocrisy.—Has any man a right to pervert the English language, by fixing new meanings to words, entirely different from and contrary to those in common use? If he knows the meaning of the words he uses, and uses them to convey a contrary meaning, he is a deceiver. The name God, used as a proper name, in the English tongue, means ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... system of Prussia is only a prop and ally of the existing order of things. In France, Napoleon makes the press, which has become in civilized countries an educator of the people, the mere instrument of his will. Tyrants do not hesitate to pervert schools and the press, learning and literature, to the support of tyranny. But with us the press and the school are free; and this freedom, denied through fear in other countries, is the best evidence of the stability of our institutions. ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... fire. Such was, soon after this time, the fate of a woman, a school-teacher by profession, found guilty of heresy. In any case, the judges took effectual measures to forestall the deplorable consequences that might ensue from permitting the "Lutherans" to address the by-standers, and so pervert them from the orthodox faith. The hangman was instructed to pierce their tongue with a hot iron, or to cut it out altogether; just as, at a later date, the sound of the drum was employed to drown the last utterances ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... his followers say that they take their doctrine of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" from Marx, they pervert the truth; they take from Marx only the phrase, not their fundamental policy. It is not to be denied that there were times when Marx himself momentarily lapsed into the error of Blanqui and the older school of Utopian, conspiratory ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... innocently delivered. But to such, where'er they sit concealed, let them know, the author defies them and their writing-tables; and hopes no sound or safe judgment will infect itself with their contagious comments, who, indeed, come here only to pervert and poison the sense of what they ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... "I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress, she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,—well, a ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... group or authority in the State again swell the one great, constant, triumphant adulatory hymn which, with its insistence, unanimity and violent sonorities, tends to bewilder all minds, deaden consciences and pervert ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... we read of a certain potion which has the power to pervert all the senses of everyone who drinks it. Nothing is apprehended truly. Sight and hearing and taste are all disordered, and the victim is all unconscious of the confusion. The deadly draught is the minister of ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... Yet because de Quincey was an opium-fiend, Poe a drunkard and Oscar Wilde a pervert, it does not follow that every clever writer is unfit for decent society. Even if he were, his popularity would not suffer. Few things help a man's public reputation so much as his private vices. Don't you think ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... be able to see every side of every question; To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long; To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose, To use great feelings and passions of the human family For base designs, for cunning ends, To wear a mask like the Greek actors— Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle, Bawling through the megaphone of big type: "This is I, the giant." Thereby also ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... *great *assembly stands *Bagnadath-el Of Kings and lordly States, Among the gods* on both his hands. *Bekerev. He judges and debates. 2 How long will ye *pervert the right *Tishphetu With *judgment false and wrong gnavel. Favouring the wicked by your might, Who thence grow bold and strong? 3 *Regard the *weak and fatherless *Shiphtu-dal. *Dispatch the *poor ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... suffice. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, you will find domestic slavery—precisely such as is maintained at this day in these States—ordained and established by God, in language which I defy you to pervert so as to leave a doubt on any honest mind that this institution was founded by him, and decreed to be ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the right to pervert language, fixing new meanings to words in common use which are in direct opposition to established usage? The man who knows the meaning of a word and uses it in a contrary sense is guilty of an abuse of language; and if he fails to make known the fact that he ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment and pervert all equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord and say, Is not the Lord among us? none evil can come upon us. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the young, after all, participate in the direction which their actions finally take. In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human nature. To take into account the contribution made by the existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them economically and wisely. Speaking accurately, all direction is but re-direction; ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the closing of the polls—whereby many are spared to their country who would otherwise incur fatal disorders by exposure to the night air while assisting in awaiting the returns. But a voting-machine that human ingenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... own novelties—the very rapid fraternization of Judith's little Cockney maid with the enemy; her own inexplicable love-at-first-sight for an Ammonite pervert; the laborious pretentiousness of Ozias, the Governor of Bethulia; the tedious garrulity of the oldest inhabitant, and the topical reference, in the manner of pantomime, to the War of 1914-1918 A.D.—these ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... no mercy towards this hell-brood of Satan, for the devil lately had become so powerful everywhere, but especially in dear Pomerania-land, that, if not prevented, he would soon pervert the whole people, and turn them away from the pure and blessed evangelical doctrine. Still he must have them all tried fairly before the sheriff's court ere he tortured or burned. His brother of ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... he died shortly after. He declared that in the presence of white British troops he had been robbed, knocked about, and kicked by armed kaffirs. I know beforehand that the officer responsible for this noble and civilised act will attempt to pervert the truth, because I am assured that His Excellency cannot sanction this method of warfare. But this case is personally known to me, and in my opinion, the declaration of a dying ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... to deny, that this gentleman has manifested very extraordinary powers of language and imagination in his treatment of the allegory, however grossly and miserably he may have tried to pervert its purpose and meaning. But of this more anon. In the meantime, what can be more deserving of reprobation than the course which he is allowing his intellect to take, and that too at the very time when he ought to be laying the foundations of a lasting ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... element in it which one does not like to name, even to condemn it,—we mean its impurity. The influence of French literary models, very strong among us just now, must not be permitted insensibly to pervert our own cleaner and sweeter national habit and taste in this matter. But we, all of us together, need to be both vigilant and firm; for the beginnings of corruption here are very insidious. Let us never grow ashamed of our saving Saxon shamefacedness. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... mill, the juice thus extracted being distilled; and aguardiente, or rum, made from sugar-cane juice. Both of these are powerful intoxicants. A very valuable and harmless article is thus sacrificed to make a liquid poison. So in our Middle and Western States we pervert both barley and rye from their legitimate purposes, and turn them ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... ideals of ecclesiastical sanctity. In any case we must protest against any presentation of our great warm-hearted Beethoven in the guise of such sanctity. If THEY cannot bring out the difference between Beethoven, whom they do not comprehend and therefore pervert, and Schumann, who, for very simple reasons, IS incomprehensible, they shall, at least, not be permitted to ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... the doctrine of dependence was dwelt on chiefly, (I do not suppose exclusively,) the public mind believed enough—I might say too much—concerning the free moral agency of man, and had not so well learned as since to pervert the doctrine of dependence to justify the waiting attitude of a passive recipient. And, then, both doctrines told with power on the mind and the conscience, and, through God, were attended with great and ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... have never subjugated a nation by winning the loyalties of the oppressed and downtrodden. The communists first win the support of liberal-intellectuals, and then use them to subvert and pervert all established mores and ideals and social and ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... withal; and he shall bring you Before the duke; and to the head of Angelo Accuse him home, and home. For my poor self, I am combined by a sacred vow, And shall be absent. Wend you with this letter: Command these fretting waters from your eyes With a light heart; trust not my holy order, If I pervert your course.—Who's here? ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... in a nest of conspirators," he remarked, dryly. "There is no longer any doubt about it. I do not know, Baron Domiloff, what magic you use to pervert honest men, but your success is certainly astounding. Now let ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... am afraid,' she returned, 'to leave him, I am afraid to leave any of them. When I am gone, they pervert—but they don't mean ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... that, as Michelet himself has said, this last act of the dreadful drama is but seldom represented. But enough may be done, without actual or conscious guilt, to pervert the feelings, and, above all, to destroy the peace and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... controversy, and, upon the hearing of it, giveth judgment, and that with great equity, which I take to be a thing worthy of special commendation in the majesty of a prince. But although he do this with a good purpose of mind, yet the corrupt magistrates do wonderfully pervert the same; but if the Emperor take them in any fault, he doth punish them most severely. Now at the last, when each party hath defended his cause with his best reasons, the judge demandeth of the accuser whether he hath any more to say ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." Had the man who wrote this story been a lawyer, and had he known how these would-be-Bible-believers, and at the same time geologists, would seek to pervert his meaning, he could not have more carefully worded his account. It is not possible for any man to express the idea of a total flood more definitely than this man has done. He does not merely say the hills were ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... Dr. Johnson's excellent distinction between liberty of conscience and liberty of teaching. JOHNSON. 'Consider, Sir; if you have children whom you wish to educate in the principles of the Church of England, and there comes a Quaker who tries to pervert them to his principles, you would drive away the Quaker. You would not trust to the predomination of right, which you believe is in your opinions; you would keep wrong out of their heads. Now the vulgar are the children of the State. If any one attempts to teach ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... unheeded. The free Lybian, in his scorching deserts, was as much a slave when he rushed, in the wild chase, upon the king of beasts, as is his unhappy offspring before our laws cleave to him. God creates no slaves. The laws of man do oftentimes pervert the best gifts of nature, and wage an impious warfare against her decrees. But you can discover what is of the earth and what is from above. You may take man at his birth, and by an adequate system make ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... door was shut in the face of invading vulgarity. Creation has not agonized in bloody sweat through countless ages of suffering and achievement that those who possess the highest opportunities for doing good should pervert those opportunities into a mere platform for the display of a harmful badness. Evolution was not aiming at Belgravia when it set out on its long journey from the flaming mist of the nebula. We cannot suppose that Nature ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... the dreaded Red Rover became gradually lost, in the fresher incidents of those eventful seas. But the mariner, long after was known to shorten the watches of the night, by recounting scenes of mad enterprise that were thought to have occurred under his auspices. Rumour did not fail to embellish and pervert them, until the real character, and even name, of the individual were confounded with the actors of other atrocities. Scenes of higher and more ennobling interest, too, were occurring on the Western Continent, to efface the circumstances ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... wilt thou utter these things, And shall the words of thy mouth be like a storm wind? Doth God pervert judgment? Or ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... I," he declared. "Do you remember we used to talk about the doctrine of responsibility? I am a pervert. I did what I had to ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lately misinspired, I sung: gay fluttering hope my fancy fired: Inly secure, through conscious scorn of ill, Nor taught by wisdom how to balance will, Rashly deceived, I saw no pits to shun, But thought to purpose and to act were one; Heedless what pointed cares pervert his way, Whom caution arms not, and whom woes betray; But now exposed, and shrinking from distress, I fly to shelter while the tempests press; My Muse to grief resigns the varying tone, The raptures languish, and the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... he said, and his face darkened as he spoke; "the newspapers are simply the hired mouthpieces of power; the devil's advocates of modern civilization; their influence is always at the service of the highest bidder; it is their duty to suppress or pervert the truth, and they do it thoroughly. They are paid to mislead the people under the guise of defending them. A century ago this thing began, and it has gone on, growing worse and worse, until now the people laugh at the opinions ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... receive it with faith unfeigned will delight to meditate on its wonderful discoveries; but those who are unrenewed in the spirit of their minds will render to it only a doubtful submission, and will pervert its plainest announcements. The apostle therefore says—"There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you." [208:5] The heretic is made manifest alike by his deviations from the doctrines ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... him. "Therefore," he continues, consciously following an argument of St. Cyprianus against the pagan miracles, "these wicked spirits do lurk in shrines, in roods, in crosses, in images: and first of all pervert the priests, which are easiest to be caught with bait of a little gain. Then work they miracles. They appear to men in divers shapes; disquiet them when they are awake; trouble them in their sleeps; distort their members; ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... Is there no sense of religion, father? Is there no future life? Is there no God—no judgment? Father, in asking me to abet your falsehood, and sustain you in your deceit, you transgress the limits of parental authority, and the first principles of natural affection. You pervert them, you abuse them; and, I must say, once and for all, that be the weight of your vengeance what it may, I prefer bearing it to enduring the weight of a ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... was entirely another affair. He could neither stifle nor deaden that. It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping. But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then? Was it what he had lost—the familiar world—rather than ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... of Italy to the other, nothing is listened to in the way of music but Rossini and his imitators. The man must have a transcendant genius, who can lead and pervert the taste of his age as Rossini has done; but unfortunately those who have not his talent, who cannot reach his beauties nor emulate his airy brilliance of imagination, think to imitate his ornamented style by merely ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... state? Are there no players here? no poet apes, That come with basilisk' s eyes, whose forked tongues Are steeped in venom, as their hearts in gall? Either of these would help me; they could wrest, Pervert, and poison all they hear or see, With senseless glosses, and allusions. Now, if you be good devils, fly me not. You know what dear and ample faculties I have endowed you with: I'll lend you more. Here, take my snakes among you, come and eat, And while the squeez'd ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... officers are, on account of the great distance, naturally exercised there with more than ordinary violence. Under all absolute governments, there is more liberty in the capital than in any other part of the country. The sovereign himself can never have either interest or inclination to pervert the order of justice, or to oppress the great body of the people. In the capital, his presence overawes, more or less, all his inferior officers, who, in the remoter provinces, from whence the complaints of the people are less likely to reach ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... and Spirit of God is to oppose, corrupt, or pervert their testimony and to turn people away from them; and the judgments of Heaven are pronounced in that Word and by that Spirit against such as turn away from the truth unto fables. They shall have their part ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... been determined for the livelihood of the rulers of the people: the more that they were forbidden to accept presents, as is clearly stated in Ex. 23:8: "You shall not [Vulg.: 'Neither shalt thou'] take bribes, which even blind the wise, and pervert the words of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history, the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter. I am far from supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other ancient poets and mythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records of antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and for my part I must confess I should have honored and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... pained," said the minister gravely. "I knew not that my brother had been a pervert from the communion ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... be difficult to fittingly characterize this scandalous effort to pervert a great State trial into an instrumentality for the successful exploitation of a commercial venture which was by no means free from the elements of ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... the work were gratuitously bestowed. Besides this they devoted much time to efforts necessary to guard against the numerous and insidious attempts made by friends of the priests, who by various arts endeavored to produce dissention and delay, as well as to pervert public opinion. ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... going to talk to you about that, Marshal," said Queen Selina. "There are many reasons why it is undesirable that Miss Heritage should remain here any longer. After the underhand and ungrateful manner in which she has tried to pervert Prince Mirliflor from his attachment to Princess Edna, I feel it my duty ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... campaign began in real earnest—a life of pleasure, a life of utter selfishness and self-indulgence, which would go far to pervert the strongest mind, tarnish the purest nature. To dress and be admired—that was what Lesbia's life meant from morning till night. She had no higher or nobler aim. Even on Sunday mornings at the fashionable church, where the women sat on one side of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... structure about it, is not to our old-fashioned minds nearly so fascinating as the wooden fabric of our early memories at more than one seaside resort of our boyhood. St. Sennan was of another school, or had become a convert or pervert, if a Saint may be judged by his pier. For this was iron or steel all through, barring the timber flooring whose planks were a quarter of an inch apart, so that you could kneel down to see the water through if you were too short to see over the advertisements a sordid spirit of commercialism ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... dissonance,—an orchestra in which each artist is tuning his instrument, setting it in a different key and to play a different tune: each bird recalls a different tune, and none sings "Annie Laurie,"—to pervert Bayard ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 13:12 f.] On the other hand, the holy Apostle Paul calls fasting, watching and labor godly weapons, with which unchastity is mastered; but, as has been said above, these exercises must do no more than overcome unchastity, and not pervert nature. ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... but seek after it only because you have nothing to do. It is the same in the enjoyments of love, in which you rather force than follow your inclinations, and are obliged to use arts, and even to pervert nature, to keep your passions alive. Thus is it that you instruct your followers—kept awake for the greatest part of the night by debaucheries, and consuming in drowsiness all the most useful part of the day. Though immortal, you are an outcast from the gods, and despised by ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... familiar with the figure of Sokrates as he went in and out amongst them; they knew his character and his manner of life; and, though the poet ventured to pervert the teaching and to ridicule the habits of a well-known citizen, he would not venture to put before the people a representation in which there was not a grain ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... consequences, that the actual motive of the woman-heart which prompted them, is utterly forgotten, and herself condemned. We must indeed deplore the mistaken tenets that could obtain such influence—deplore that man could so pervert the service of a God of love, as to believe and inculcate that such things could be acceptable to Him; but we should pause, and ask, if we ourselves had been influenced by such teaching, could we break from it? ere ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... is no friend to a house who calumniates the husband to the wife. Is it the part of a friend to distort dear Ernest's kindliness and gayety into ill morals; to pervert his love of poetry and plays into an unworthy attachment to actors and—oh!" and the tears would come. But she dried them, for now she hated this man; with all the little power of hatred she had, she detested him. "Do you suppose I did not know Mrs. Woffington was to come ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... men have an implicit notion of it, and are sensible, that they owe obedience to government merely on account of the public interest; and at the same time, that human nature is so subject to frailties and passions, as may easily pervert this institution, and change their governors into tyrants and public enemies. If the sense of common interest were not our original motive to obedience, I would fain ask, what other principle is there in ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... better title to that elevation than Titus Flavius Vespasian. He had not only served with great reputation in the wars both in Britain and Judaea, but seemed as yet untainted with any vice which could pervert his conduct in the civil administration of the empire. It appears, however, that he was prompted more by the persuasion of friends, than by his own ambition, to prosecute the attainment of the ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... that it will cease to recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... of sound, from the choirs of spring, and the other innumerable minstrelsies of nature, as well as from the higher art of man, that soothe, elevate, and solemnise. It is true, indeed, that there are grosser appetites of the body which many pervert so as to enslave the spirit; thus abusing by gluttony, drunkenness, and every form of sensuality, what God the merciful and wise has intrusted to man to be used for wise and merciful ends. But even here there is already perceptible a marked difference between those appetites ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod |
