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

I don't necessarily love the sports per se I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.

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.

There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.