Already Strasbourg, Toul, and Metz have been called to endure this indiscriminate massacre, where there is no distinction of persons; and now the same fate is threatened to Paris the Beautiful, with its thronging population counted by the million.
— from Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 18 (of 20) by Charles Sumner

Modern science, with instinctive horror of all that is pretty to see, or easy to remember, entirely rejects the plumage, as any element or noticeable condition of bird-kinds; nor have I ever yet tried to make it one myself; yet there are certain qualities of downiness in ducks, fluffiness in owls, spottiness in thrushes, patchiness in pies, bronzed or rusty luster in cocks, and pearly iridescence in doves, which I believe may be aptly brought into connection with other defining characters; and when we find an entirely similar disposition of plumage, and nearly the same form, in two birds, I do not think that mere difference in size should far separate them.
— from Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds by John Ruskin

It is in the writings of Morselli, Professor of Psychology at Genoa, and in the reports of Bottazzi, head of the Department of Physics at Naples, that scepticism, such as my own, is met and conquered.
— from The Shadow World by Hamlin Garland

He secretly preaches a proscribed doctrine of polygamy as necessary to salvation; he publicly denies his own teaching, so that he may escape responsibility for the sufferings of the "plural wives" and their unfortunate children, who have been betrayed by the authority of his dogma.
— from Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft by Frank J. Cannon

The hollow, specious, moral judgments of mankind, when under the dominion of prejudice, are not the standards by which to judge the men of life and earnestness: the men whose convictions, and not whose personal interests, mark their path.
— from William Cobbett: A Biography in Two Volumes, Vol. 2 by Edward Smith