Perverse Quotes

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.

I’m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that’s the most obvious.

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.

Fundamentally, I was a very shy and quiet person growing up, so it was just really difficult getting up on a stage. It was a perverse career choice really.

Self-control is needed in the age of technology. Folks have to apply their sense in reacting to different things. I don’t appreciate perverse and venom-spewing mindset.

I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

Around the nation, lawmakers have drawn up their districts with such perverse precision and aversion to competition, that legislators rarely face competitive challenges.

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.

You’re under tremendous pressure, and everyone needs you to be perfect all the time, and that often creates a perverse incentive to not tell the truth. Please remember – when you get caught not telling the truth, it’s over.

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.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.

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.

And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

I don’t know why actors are just attracted to really messed up people, but it almost makes it more fun, in a perverse way.

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.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein are clearly deplorable. No matter how many great films he’s bullied into production, or his guilt-induced contributions to left-minded ideals, this kind of intimidation and abuse of power is perverse and utterly unforgivable. Period.

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.

The truth is that those who join gangs – more often than not they are young men in their later teens – often do come from the most difficult family backgrounds, from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership can bring a perverse sense of belonging which they may not have ever got at home.

Isn’t that the most perverse thing you’ve ever heard?

It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.

New Year’s resolutions have always been something to beat myself up with by the second week of January. It seems perverse to set yourself up for failure right at the start of the year.

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

As an actor, if I show up late somewhere or I say something that’s eccentric, it’s totally acceptable – not only that, it’s lauded in some perverse way.

The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: ‘Prove to me why we should.’

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.

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.

The perverse gift of the Chinese coronavirus is that it has given Americans an up close and personal look at the horrors of big government – and, by extension, socialism.

Someone at Hollywood Records said, ‘Are you into Alanis Morissette?’ I said ‘Yeah, she sells 26 million albums, of course. It would be perverse if she works with me, but I don’t think you can get her.’ A week later they say she’s coming down the studio.

Language is very important. If you are condoning acts of terror… you are giving credibility to a view that is perverse and is wrong.

To punish MPs because of the distance they live from London – those with fast train journeys quite close to London as well as those at some distance from both the capital or an appropriate airport – is perverse, but also dangerous to democracy.

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.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

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.

A risk-insensitive leverage ratio can be a useful backstop to risk-based capital requirements. But such a ratio can have perverse incentives if it is the binding capital requirement because it treats relatively safe activities, such as central clearing, as equivalent to the most risky activities.

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

I tend to have this perverse reaction to authority and stress: I become more confident and clear when a challenge is enormous.

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.

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.

It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.

It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.

You can’t really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you’re accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you’re labelled willful and perverse.