The difficulties of a retreat are naturally greater or less according as the battle has been fought under more or less favourable circumstances, and according as it has been more or less obstinately contested.
— from On War — Volume 1 by Carl von Clausewitz

Even the gesture with which he laid his hand upon those clinging fingers on his sleeve was diffident and almost tremulous; tender and reverent as no gesture of his had ever been in all his life before.
— from A Valiant Ignorance; vol. 3 of 3 A Novel in Three Volumes by Mary Angela Dickens

The conclusion of the whole matter is this: a good house must be founded upon a rock, and no government or civilization can be permanent that is not based on the freedom, property and intelligence of the working classes.
— from The Battle of Principles A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict by Newell Dwight Hillis

The frequency of Palmer’s visits to Cook during the illness of the latter at Rugeley affords no ground of suspicion against the prisoner.
— from The Most Extraordinary Trial of William Palmer, for the Rugeley Poisonings, which lasted Twelve Days by Anonymous

she said to herself, at one station where some minutes had to be spent for no apparent reason, as nobody got out or got in, and neither express nor luggage train passing by solved the enigma—”‘Merle-in-the-Wold!’
— from Philippa by Mrs. Molesworth

8 Our New England town-house, therefore, is a symbol of institutions, partly original with our fathers, partly a priceless inheritance from Old England the land of our fathers, and nearly in the whole, if not quite, a regermination and new growth of old race instincts and practices on a new soil.
— from The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884 by Various

Any man that knew his right hand from his left, and who could follow a ridge, and not get off of it to cross any water flowing to the right or the left, could trace the boundary, and establish it in the very words of the treaty.
— from Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2) or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 by Thomas Hart Benton

In the city, folks don't use the way they do on a ranch and night goes on about the same as daytime.
— from The Man Next Door by Emerson Hough