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Quotes About Perversions

The desire, profound and pitiful, to be appreciated. If that is thwarted, if through an unpleasing personality a human being is unable to get the response it needs, it turns to other methods—it must be felt—it must count—and so to innumerable strange perversions. The habit of cruelty, like any other habit, can be cultivated, can take hold of one—
~ Agatha Christie
In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.
~ Edward St. Aubyn
Public displays of puritanical religiosity mask the private perversions of the real Washington behind closed doors.
~ Gavin Esler
Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.
~ Anais Nin
The five marks of the Roman decaying culture: Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth; Obsession with sex and perversions of sex; Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original; Widening disparity between very rich and very poor; Increased demand to live off the state.
~ Edward Gibbon
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
~ Arthur C. Clarke
of all the perversions, the strangest was celibacy, the desire to cancel all desire, to hate it. Not that you could abolish it once and for all. Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning—it was ultimately indigestible.
~ Hanif Kureishi
In brief, imitation belongs first among the basic structures that rule human conduct, so that even seeming desertions must be understood as mere perversions. Second, imitation can be actualized explicitly through love: "They loved by believing; they imitated by loving."36
~ Hannah Arendt
Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.
~ Anais Nin
Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
~ Frantz Fanon
The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of perversions. Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
~ Michel Foucault
Wealth hung awkwardly on some people, gave rise to perversions of taste and common sense: fad diets and Tae Bo and shit-in-milk-jug art exhibits. Some people were better off poor.
~ Craig Davidson
The greatest task of morals is always sexual regulation; for the reproductive instinct creates problems not only within marriage, but before and after it, and threatens at any moment to disturb social order with its persistence, its intensity, its scorn of law, and its perversions.
~ Will Durant
Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!
~ Marquis de Sade
The most ominous of modern perversions is the shame of appearing naïve if we do not flirt with evil. (La más ominosa de las perversiones modernas es la vergüenza de parecer ingenuos si no coqueteamos con el mal.)
~ Nicolás Gómez Dávila