He thought of the amenities of a life, of friendship, and of how nice it would be to live with a comrade on, say, the bank of some river, and to span the river with a bridge of his own, and to build an enormous mansion with a facade lofty enough even to afford a view to Moscow.
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

He apparently felt like everyone else, that all this was very foolish, but he dared not say so.
— from What Shall We Do? by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

It is becoming open and free like everything else that is British;—open to the poor man as well as to the rich.
— from The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson By One of the Firm by Anthony Trollope