Perversity Quotes - Page 2

• Prior to Valentinus, those who follow Valentinus had no existence. Nor did those from Marcion exist before Marcion. Nor, in short, did any of those malignant-minded people, whom I have listed above, have any existence previous to the initiators and inventors of their perversity.

  Irenaeus of Lyons

  Sarcastic, People, Existence

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• The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Death, Enjoy

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Years, Doubt

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

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

  Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

  Forgiveness, Revenge, Heart

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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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• 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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• 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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• Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.

  Mason Cooley

  Substitution, Depends, Reversal

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• Increasingly, I wonder if there are any outrages that would be sufficiently ominous in their effects upon liberty and unequivocal in their moral perversity to awaken the American people to the tyrannical spirit that envelopes the Clinton White House.

  Alan Keyes

  White, People, House

  "New barbarians". mobile.wnd.com. May 6, 2000.

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• A man must have something to grumble about; and if he cant complain that his wife harries him to death with her perversity and ill-humour, he must complain that she wears him out with her kindness and gentleness.

  Anne Bronte

  Kindness, Men, Wife

  Anne Bronte (2006). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, p.43, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• But there is that about well-intentioned advice that has the opposite effect of the one intended, and causes a Spanish fly of perversity to enter into the hitherto passive soul.

  Caitlin Thomas

  Opposites, Advice, Soul

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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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• Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

  Adam Gopnik

  Player, Drawing, Risk

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