For this to most persons seems naturally bound up with ownership: yet it is paradoxical to say that we interfere with a man’s freedom of action by anything that we may do after his death to what he owned during his life: and jurists have often treated this right as purely conventional and not therefore included in ‘natural law.’
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

The hearth is always so clean and neat that it is evident that a fire is only kindled there on great occasions; the stone chimney-piece is adorned by a couple of vases filled with faded artificial flowers imprisoned under glass shades, on either side of a bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

This goes on every year, but the representatives of the conquerors are not touched: it is the descendants of the conquered alone who are the victims.”
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield

The book is really one of the two or three great Socialist classics; and now that it is in English, it must find a place in the library of everyone who hopes to master the real fundamental philosophy underlying Socialism."
— from The Red Conspiracy by Joseph J. Mereto

This Preface consists of twenty-two pages, and contains almost nothing that is interesting to the critic, much that displays superficial and newly-acquired acquaintance with the whole subject.
— from A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, Vol. I. by Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener

You have not yet presumed to deny positively, that Congress has the right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; and, notwithstanding the intimation in your speech, you will not presume to affirm, that Congress has the Constitutional right to enact laws reducing to, or holding in slavery, the inhabitants of West Point, or any other locality in the free States, over which it has exclusive jurisdiction.
— from The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 2 of 4 by American Anti-Slavery Society

Where children are not thriving, it is often a good practice to wean earlier, in which case modified cow's milk, taken from a bottle, must be substituted.
— from Health on the Farm: A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene by H. F. (Henry Fauntleroy) Harris

Chemical decomposition is a phenomenon of so complicated a nature, that it is more than doubtful whether we are yet in possession of data sufficient to enable us to analyze the process with accuracy.
— from The History of Chemistry, Volume 2 (of 2) by Thomas Thomson

All these charges are new; that is, I did not make them in my original speech.
— from Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Volume 2 (of 2) by William Henry Herndon