Perverse Will Quotes

#1. For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity.

Augustine Of Hippo

#2. Nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it.

Jonathan Weiner

#3. If our current barbaric world spirals into greater corruption and brutality, our descendants may become so cruel and so morally perverse that they cross time to watch us suffer, bearing orgasmic witness to the bloodbaths from which their sick civilization grew.

Dean Koontz

#4. I listened to the whine in my voice with a detached fascination. It was a false question. No answer would have pacified me. I had simply given in to a perverse need to ask, to expose and torment myself, and as soon as I heard the words, I experienced both relief and humiliation.

Siri Hustvedt

#5. On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#6. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving.

John Stossel

#7. Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

Sydney J. Harris

#8. I think it would be slightly perverse to continue tempting fate by going back to the same places and doing the same sort of thing.

Stephen Farrell

#9. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.

Edgar Allan Poe

#10. I'm often reassured in a bizarre - perhaps perverse - way when I find in the archive stuff that contradicts what my assumptions have been. That's interesting and exciting.

Antony Beevor

#11. Maybe I'm strange and perverse, but I've always thought there was something sexy about a compelling argument.

Therese Doucet

#12. Global warming ... may be a plaintiff lawyer's dream. And it's interesting, in a perverse way, to imagine how a jury in 2050 might react to some of the recent industry-backed studies minimizing the dangers of global warming. I suspect future jurors will not be amused.

David Ignatius

#13. I write the book for one person - for Fiona [Staples, the artist]. I spend a lot of time just thinking how she'll react to things and manipulating her into drawing perverse, horrific things. It's a really weird job but I enjoy it.

Brian K. Vaughan

#14. I don't know how exactly but I'm maybe perverse in the sense that I like being disappointed in something on a daily basis. Because it means that I'm still not jaded.

Rose McGowan

#15. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.

Junot Diaz

#16. There were clouds at the mountains, and the snow pack reflected the sour-lemon sun into one of the most beautiful and perverse sunsets I had ever seen. The clouds were dappled like the hindquarters of an Appaloosa colt, and the beauty kicked just as hard.

Craig Johnson

#17. He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.

Emily Bronte

#18. Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

Robert Adams

#19. Advocates of dumbing down should note the wonderfully perverse fact that 'University Challenge' and 'Mastermind' were watched by millions who could hardly even understand the questions, let alone ejaculate the answers. Maybe they just liked to watch smart people sweating.

Declan Lynch

#20. There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny.

Eric Allman

#21. Perfection does not consist in macerating or killing the body, but in killing our perverse self-will.

St. Catherine Of Siena

#22. I would define myself as being naive and perverse at the same time. And I think that if that is consistent it will make the tone consistent.

Michel Gondry

#23. The current regulations -- for companies, doctors and researchers -- create perverse incentives; and we'll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice

Ben Goldacre

#24. Love exercised while duty is neglected will make children headstrong, willful, perverse, selfish, and disobedient. If stern duty is left to stand alone without love to soften and win, it will have a similar result. Duty and love must be blended in order that children may be properly disciplined.

Ellen G. White

#25. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

David Quammen

#26. I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

Anais Nin

#27. I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.

Augustus William Hare

#28. I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so.

John B. S. Haldane

#29. In seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker ...

Charles Dickens

#30. Fallible, adj.
I was hurt. Of course I was hurt. But in a perverse way, I was relieved that you were the one who mad the mistake. It made me worry less about myself.

David Levithan

#31. An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

Thomas Boswell

#32. If you forbid [children] from doing what is natural , they will seek it out later in ways that are unnatural and perverse.

Debra Ollivier

#33. Our generation will not have regretted both perverse crimes, and the eerie silence of the kind

Martin Luther King Jr.

#34. But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This "perversity" always voiced itself thus: "Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.

Henry Miller

#35. For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him.

Thucydides

#36. When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

George Akerlof

#37. When the frontier between God and man, the last inexorable barrier and obstacle, is not closed, the barrier between what is normal and what is perverse is opened.

Karl Barth

#38. From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.

Stanley Hauerwas

#39. The malicious humor of men, though perverse and refractory, is not so savage and invincible but it may be wrought upon by kindness, and altered by repeated obligations.

Plutarch

#40. Here in the Motor City, we take an almost perverse pride in doing things the hard way, or whatever way that means we can be left alone to do our thing however we want.

Anna Clark

#41. The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse - it will not submit to the mold of flattery.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

#42. [Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

Aristophanes

#43. His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life.

Irvine Welsh

#44. The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it.

David Plotz

#45. So perverse is mankind that every nationality prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another

Charles James

#46. The horse, the noblest, bravest, proudest, most courageous and certainly the most perverse and infuriating animal that humans ever domesticated

Anne McCaffrey

#47. Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.

Rose George

#48. End perverse incentives that reward Wall Street speculators.

Ralph Nader

#49. Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. - because the total emissions are set by the cap.

James Hansen

#50. Every day after school for 10 years, I was on the set of 'Married ... with Children,' which is a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up.

Meghan Markle

#51. I think that obviously, there is a perverse attraction to a fundamentally changed world or the end of the world. There is a death wish, a perverse death wish. Not just for ourselves, not just for the movie 'Death Wish,' but for the end of all human life.

John Hodgman

#52. Identifying pain in others was easy for me. I was drawn to it in some strange perverse way.

Abbi Glines

#53. Being an actor somehow can be a perverse extension of that feeling we generally all have as children, that feeling of wanting to please. Of course you're looking for affirmation, encouragement.

Gina McKee

#54. Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it's safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments.

Tina Brown

#55. Working with David Bowie was very interesting, but I couldn't surrender to it. I should have let him produce a record for me, but I'm very perverse in some ways. He's brilliant, but the entourage were rather daunting.

Marianne Faithfull

#56. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. I mean we've all read pieces where we thought, 'Oh, who gives a damn.'

Nora Ephron

#57. Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?

Jacqueline Carey

#58. Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

Mary Gaitskill

#59. It is perverse that a nation so rich should neglect its children so shamefully. Our attitude toward them is cruelly ambivalent. Weare sentimental about children but in our actions do not value them. We say we love them but give them little honor.

Richard Stolley

#60. I have a perverse attraction to risk. Not physical risk but emotional, financial risk - anything than can't kill you immediately.

Scott Adams

#61. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.

Roger Kimball

#62. A perverse temper and fretful disposition will make any state of life whatsoever unhappy.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#63. All of our relationships are based on self-interest, discrimination and a perverse need for gain.

Bryant McGill

#64. He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.

Ian McEwan

#65. But when I clicked over to my e-mail program, it was just another "great opportunity" spam, this time adding the words "don't delete!" to the subject line. With a sense of perverse satisfaction, I deleted it. It was probably the only act of rebellion I'd get away with all day.

Shanna Swendson

#66. She was an uptight elitist bitch who considered fast food unworthy of being fed to dogs, but when she did something she did it wholeheartedly, with perverse gusto, as if to show she was so far beyond irony she'd circled back to authenticity.

Leah Raeder

#67. I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.

Tracy Letts

#68. That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.

Zadie Smith

#69. The supply-side effect of a restrictive monetary policy is likely to be perverse, in that high interest rates enter into costs and thus exert inflationary pressure.

William Vickrey

#70. The four stages of acceptance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so."

(Review of The Truth About Death, in: Journal of Genetics 1963, Vol. 58, p.464)

J.B.S. Haldane

#71. Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as legislature ... So people who go to bed to sleep Must count French premiers or sheep, And people who ought to arise from bed Yawn and go back to sleep instead.

Ogden Nash

#72. When you create an economy where you subsidize corporate profits through a welfare program and food stamps in order to keep wages low in some perverse pursuit of 'competiveness,' than you reap the fruits of the anger that you sow.

Martin O'Malley

#73. Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson - one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job - about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.

George Will

#74. My loneliness turned itself inside out and I grew myself a kind of perverse pride.

Phyllis Gotlieb