We should see the honour of defending the common cause confined by statecraft to a mercenary part of the people.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

But some time after Mr. Payne showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

At each of these portals were stationed two heralds, attended by six trumpets, as many pursuivants, and a strong body of men-at-arms for maintaining order, and ascertaining the quality of the knights who proposed to engage in this martial game.
— from Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott

I have prescribed scurvy grass and St. John's wort, and ordered the man to eat carrots, and given him a dose of soda; but such things are mere palliatives—I want something of a more drastic nature.
— from Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

One declared that she had been seen thrice at midnight prowling about the vicinity of the scaffold.
— from In the Name of Liberty: A Story of the Terror by Owen Johnson

Roughly, then, two-thirds of the national wealth goes to 5,000,000 of persons, quite half of whom are idle, and one-third is shared by seven times as many people, nearly half of whom are workers.
— from Britain for the British by Robert Blatchford

He then addressed Mr Reece: “Your ship and mine belong to the same owners, and I want as many of your men as can be spared to assist my people in repairing our damages, for we are terribly short-handed.
— from The Two Whalers; Or, Adventures in the Pacific by William Henry Giles Kingston

If the said prince were alive in these days (wherein Andrew Boord saith there are more parks in England than in all Europe, over which he travelled in his own person), and saw how much ground they consume, I think he would either double his oaths, or lay most of them open, that tillage might be better looked unto.
— from Elizabethan England From 'A Description of England,' by William Harrison by William Harrison

There was nothing, he assured him, that he desired more than an agreement with Spain on all points; and though it all came to nothing at the time, and shortly afterwards the Flemish Commissioners were curtly dismissed, a letter was handed to Guaras late in August 1572 to be sent to Alba, making professions of willingness to negotiate for a reopening of trade, and to withdraw the English troops from Flanders.
— from The Great Lord Burghley: A study in Elizabethan statecraft by Martin A. S. (Martin Andrew Sharp) Hume

A society charged with these tremendous duties, the only organ of the Divine will and affording the only assurance of salvation, must obviously be superior to all mundane powers.
— from Medieval Europe by H. W. Carless (Henry William Carless) Davis

They pedaled back side by side talking amicably, mutually pleased to find they were neighbors.
— from Miss Maitland, Private Secretary by Geraldine Bonner