One can distinguish on its ruins three sorts of lesions, all three of which cut into it at different depths; first, time, which has insensibly notched its surface here and there, and gnawed it everywhere; next, political and religious revolution, which, blind and wrathful by nature, have flung themselves tumultuously upon it, torn its rich garment of carving and sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of arabesques and tiny figures, torn out its statues, sometimes because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid deviations of the Renaissance, have followed each other in the necessary decadence of architecture.
— from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

And as experience shows, many have been the conspiracies, but few have been successful; because he who conspires cannot act alone, nor can he take a companion except from those whom he believes to be malcontents, and as soon as you have opened your mind to a malcontent you have given him the material with which to content himself, for by denouncing you he can look for every advantage; so that, seeing the gain from this course to be assured, and seeing the other to be doubtful and full of dangers, he must be a very rare friend, or a thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince, to keep faith with you.
— from The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

Having finished speaking, he dismissed the two young men; and, in quick succession, servants came to make their business reports, not limited to three and five companies, but as Chia Lien felt exhausted, he forthwith sent word to those on duty at the second gate not to allow any one at all to communicate any reports, and that the whole crowd should wait till the next day, when he would give his mind to what had to be done.
— from Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book I by Xueqin Cao

For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

When all reference to outcome is eliminated from the sequence of ideas and acts that make play, each member of the sequence is cut loose from every other and becomes fantastic, arbitrary, aimless; mere fooling follows.
— from How We Think by John Dewey

ANT: Rarify, dissipate, refine, attenuate, clear, purify, strain, percolate, clarify, defecate, depurate, brighten, lighten, open, filtrate, diminish, separate, reduce, narrow, contract, liberate, free, extricate, unravel, disentangle, loosen.
— from A Complete Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms or, Synonyms and Words of Opposite Meaning by Samuel Fallows

Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself—which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

After which there were two of the most comical looking fellows ever seen wearing the uniform of Boy Scouts.
— from The Boy Scouts on the Trail; or, Scouting through the Big Game Country by Carter, Herbert, active 1909-1917

Summer, though, cannot last for ever, and woods do not make an ideal nursery in winter.
— from The Carroll Girls by Mabel Quiller-Couch

With these six a [22] frontier community could live, for every man of them was a potential butcher, tanner, trader.
— from Quaker Hill A Sociological Study by Warren H. (Warren Hugh) Wilson

The sensitiveness to economic inferiority is increased in the French militant workingmen by the fact that in a country like France economic distinctions are combined with social distinctions.
— from Syndicalism in France by Lewis L. (Lewis Levitzki) Lorwin

A groundwork of small split cane or other material runs in parallel curved lines from end to end, single pieces of the material being generally doubled back at the [ 62 ] ends so as to form several lines; and this is strengthened and ornamented by interplaiting into it either split cane or some other material obtained from the splitting of the inside fibre of a plant in the way previously referred to.
— from The Mafulu: Mountain People of British New Guinea by Robert Wood Williamson

The fine hardness of his profile, the strength of his jaw—not massive, but with one clean line from ear to chin—and something in the utter intensity of his attitude, attracted my attention, and I asked the colonel about him.
— from Back to Life by Philip Gibbs

Even during Sulla's lifetime, when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists resisted the regent; the Cornelian laws, for example, which deprived various Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated in judicial decisions as null and void; and in like manner the courts held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold into slavery during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited.
— from The History of Rome, Book V The Establishment of the Military Monarchy by Theodor Mommsen

Why, were I in such a predicament as marriage with her, how do you suppose I could live for ever the actor I am now, when conversing with her, drawing her out as it were, to afford me amusement afterwards?
— from Home Scenes and Heart Studies by Grace Aguilar

Not even a suggestion of the fruitless toil and the disillusionment which he shared with scores of other amateur diggers during the first two years of his colonial life finds expression in any of his novels.
— from Australian Writers by Desmond Byrne