"When you give that banquet, Neroweg," added Imnachair, despite the glances of Chram to check the insolence of his favorites, "when you give us that banquet, you will not make us eat and drink, as you do to-day, out of copper and tin vessels, while you spread out before our dazzled eyes your gold and silver utensils in the center of the table—far from our reach.
— from The Poniard's Hilt; Or, Karadeucq and Ronan. A Tale of Bagauders and Vagres by Eugène Sue

Can a nation be said to be civilized that spends billions of dollars every year in the detection and punishment of crime, and not one cent for the prevention and cure of disease, which kills thousands of persons who might otherwise have retained their health and strength?
— from Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World by Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman) Wooldridge

“Did the board of directors elect you to any salaried office?”
— from The Making of Bobby Burnit Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man by George Randolph Chester

Sons of my age, attend; Come round the bed of death, Ere yet his cold damp dews Extinguish life's weak flame.
— from Poems: Containing The Restropect, Odes, Elegies, Sonnets, &c. by Robert Southey

From observations communicated to the Royal Society of the births and deaths in the city of Breslau, he constructed the first table of mortality, which was in a great measure the foundation of the celebrated hypothesis of De Moivre, that the decrements of human life are nearly equal at all ages; that is, that out of eighty-six persons born, one dies every year, until all are gone.
— from The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 1 (of 7) by Arthur Thomas Malkin

Do you know that the women of the United States spend a billion of dollars every year for textile materials alone?
— from Clothing and Health: An Elementary Textbook of Home Making by Anna M. (Anna Maria) Cooley