Perverse Quotes

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. (Warren Buffett)

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.

J. B. S. Haldane

The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.

Italo Calvino

Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

Fernando Pessoa

The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the "liberal” rhetoric of "equal time.”.

Stephen Jay Gould

Our whole life can go on in observation of the laws of nature, if we gain dominion over our desires from the beginning and if we do not kill, by various means of a perverse art, the human offspring, born according to the designs of divine providence; for these women who, in order to hide their immorality, use abortive drugs which expel the child completely dead, abort at the same time their own human feelings.

Clement of Alexandria

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

Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.

Camille Paglia

Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

Camille Paglia

I think there's something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It's impossible to articulate, and it's happening now, almost like a perverse secret.... That's always sort of fascinating to me.

Miranda July

I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery. (John Kennedy Toole)

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Thomas Mann

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.

Carl Sagan

Many have been led astray by the Qur'an: by clinging to that rope many have fallen into the well. There is no fault in the rope, O perverse man, for it was you who had no desire to reach the top.

Rumi

All of my roles have had their own unique set of challenges, and I enjoy that in some perverse, masochistic way. I'm always dying though! Maybe I have some kind of fetish.

Jared Leto

Whatever misanthropists may say, ingrates and the perverse are exceptions in the human species.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.

Studs Terkel

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

Richard Russo

Men of perverse opinion do not know the excellence of what is in their hands, till someone dash it from them.

Sophocles

I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes...? Let's put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.

Errol Morris

The intellectual's ... playfulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dangerous. And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to the practical business of life. (Richard Hofstadter)

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.

Erik Larson

I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.

Megan Abbott

Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.

George Gaylord Simpson

The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

Charles Trevelyan

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