Perversity Quotes - Page 2

• Money is an instrumentality of the profit motive and must be issued and backed only by private enterprisers. Economic and political perversities are inescapable while government is admitted to money power. Since all national governments have, up to the present, been money issuing powers we may justly attribute all the economic and political ills of mankind to this single error.

  E.C. Riegel

  Government, Errors, Political

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• I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

  Russell Kirk

  Winning, Thinking, Sides

  Russell Kirk (2014). “The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays”, p.59, Open Road Media

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• Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

  Clifford D. Simak

  Light, Race, Years

  Clifford D. Simak (2015). “Highway of Eternity”, p.70, Open Road Media

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• Though Rome's gross yoke Drops off, no more to be endured, Her teaching is not so obscured By errors and perversities, That no truth shines athwart the lies.

  Robert Browning

  Lying, Teaching, Errors

  Robert Browning, John Woolford, Daniel Karlin (1991). “The Poems of Browning: 1847-1861”, p.72, Pearson Education

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• To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals -- and critics of the Women's Movement.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Husband, Artist, Movement

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1974). “Unlearning the lie: sexism in school”, William Morrow & Company

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• It seems to me a measure of the true perversity
  of the human race, that one of its very few
  reliably pleasurable activities should be the
  subject of so much hysteria and repression.

  Otto Gross

  Race, Hysteria, Should

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• Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

  William James

  Running, Men, Sobriety

  1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience,'Mysticism'.

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• Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance --

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Being Generous, Generous, Resemblance

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.330, Penguin

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• There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.

  Octave Mirbeau

  Depression, Mental Illness, Inexplicable

  Octave Mirbeau (1997). “Torture Garden”, Dedalus Limited

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• Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

  Dave Hickey

  Silence, Sheer

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• I could be mistaken, but I believe the majority of artists are perverts, and that inspiration springs from the seat of perversity; that smooth stretch of consciousness between the balls and ass.

  James Jean

  Spring, Believe, Inspiration

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• I hope, by being honest about what happened to me, to help nourish a culture of honesty that might make something different - and better - possible. We really need to squarely face the issue of child abuse in America, and to look at our perversity, our illness.

  Laura Mullen

  Children, Honesty, America

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Man's sense of values is so degraded that he does not revere the Geetha, as much as he values and scans the pages of the daily newspaper. This is to be attributed to sheer ignorance and perversity, or pitiable fate.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Ignorance, Fate, Men

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• I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.

  Nick Cave

  Thinking, Years, Balls

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• My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Mother, Fall, Men

  "Les Confidences: Confidential Disclosures" by Alphonse de Lamartine, translated by Eugène Plunkett, New York: D. Appleton & Co., (Book IV, Note VIII, p. 60), 1857.

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• Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Wrecks, May

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Aug 06, 2011

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• I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure - stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

  Agnes Varda

  Real, People, Interesting

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I sort of feel sorry for gays being the last ones at the sexual revolution window. We've had liberalizing rules on divorce. We've had the sexual revolution. We've had, you know, the pill, and burning bras and rampant premarital sex and polymorphous perversity.

  Ann Coulter

  Sex, Sorry, Divorce

  "The Situation" with Tucker Carlson, www.nbcnews.com. June 6, 2006.

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• The human heart in its perversity finds it hard to escape hatred and revenge.

  Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

  Forgiveness, Revenge, Heart

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• Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.

  Mason Cooley

  Substitution, Depends, Reversal

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• Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Self, Torture, Thirst

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• She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.

  Maya Angelou

  Lying, Struggle, Joy

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.206, Modern Library

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• Louis B. Mayer is one of those with a claim to posessing the equation... he began to buy up nickelodeon arcades in the years before the First World War in and around Boston. He had noticed that people liked going into the dark to see the light... the appeal of the movies is beyond the sensible, rational or the hard-working. Going into the dark, afte centuries of progress in which mankind has staggered toward artificial light, smacks of delicious perversity.

  Edward Jay Epstein

  War, Hard Work, Dark

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• Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism; and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.

  William Hazlitt

  Children, Character, Envy

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• I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance - You, O God - towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matters.

  Saint Augustine

  Substance, Wickedness, Matter

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