Man has been held out as independent of his power who made him, or as a lawless planet darting from its orbit to steal the celestial fire of reason; and the vengeance of heaven, lurking in the subtile flame, sufficiently punished his temerity, by introducing evil into the world.
— from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects by Mary Wollstonecraft

This is the consummate form of reason applied to conduct, but there are minor forms of it, less independent or original, but nevertheless of great value, such as the power to think out the proper cause of policy in novel circumstances or the power to see the proper line of treatment to follow in a court of law.
— from The Ethics of Aristotle by Aristotle

He had been told to make a night march, but waited till dawn, because he was moving in a difficult and broken country full of ravines and torrents, where he judged that movement in the dark was dangerous.
— from Wellington's Army, 1809-1814 by Charles Oman

In these valleys, by rocks near the streams and under trees, live, the Bedouin told us, those curious semi-divine spirits which they call jinni , the propitiating of which seems to be the chief form of religion amongst them.
— from Southern Arabia by Bent, Theodore, Mrs.

This was also in the year 771 B.C., and this is really one of the great pivot-points in Chinese history, of equal weight with the almost contemporaneous founding of Rome, and the gradual substitution of a Roman centre for a Greek centre in the development and civilization of the Far West.
— from Ancient China Simplified by Edward Harper Parker

Many have been both the reformers producing and the statesmen correcting, revolutions; minds which, with the fire of enthusiasm, and the hot impulse of indignation at wrongs done, have united a judicious discrimination, a cool faculty of reflection, and the power of separating the benefits from the evils of revolution.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, May, 1862 Devoted To Literature And National Policy by Various

It seems sometimes, as though I had stood upon the shore of exile and gazed with tearful eyes toward home and native land; as though my nails had been torn from my hands, and into the bleeding quick needles had been thrust; as though my feet had been crushed in iron boots; as though I had been chained in the cell of the Inquisition and listened with dying ears for the coming footsteps of release; as though I had stood upon the scaffold and had seen the glittering axe fall upon me; as though I had been upon the rack and had seen, bending above me, the white faces of hypocrite priests; as though I had been taken from my fireside, from my wife and children, taken to the public square, chained; as though fagots had been piled about me; as though the flames had climbed around my limbs and scorched my eyes to blindness, and as though my ashes had been scattered to the four winds, by all the countless hands of hate.
— from The Ghosts, and Other Lectures by Robert Green Ingersoll

The district, says Defoe, was “a rich enclosed country, full of rivers and towns, and infinitely populous, in so much that some of the market towns are equal to cities in bigness, and superior to many of them in numbers of people.”
— from A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2) From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time by Charles Creighton

We first travelled to the north through cultivated fields of rice, along the river Zenghí to Kent Khoja, the khass of the Khán of Eriván, with five hundred houses, a mosque and a bath; then fourteen hours further to Kent Demijí Hassan, which was anciently a town of the Turcomans, and is even now inhabited by a Turcoman tribe.
— from Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. II by Evliya Çelebi