The Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairs.
— from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

[78] If it were argued that in the case of Belgium something more nearly resembling an indemnity for general war costs can be justified, this could only be on the ground of the breach of International Law involved in the invasion of Belgium, whereas, as we have seen, the Fourteen Points include no special demands on this ground.
— from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes

In the first place, I never asked you to come upon this island.
— from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

Upon this is founded that saying, That the reigns of good princes have been always most dangerous to the liberties of their people: for when their successors, managing the government with different thoughts, would draw the actions of those good rulers into precedent, and make them the standard of their prerogative, as if what had been done only for the good of the people was a right in them to do, for the harm of the people, if they so pleased; it has often occasioned contest, and sometimes public disorders, before the people could recover their original right, and get that to be declared not to be prerogative, which truly was never so; since it is impossible that any body in the society should ever have a right to do the people harm; though it be very possible, and reasonable, that the people should not go about to set any bounds to the prerogative of those kings, or rulers, who themselves transgressed not the bounds of the public good: for prerogative is nothing but the power of doing public good without a rule.
— from Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Analytic experience will then show you that the first person is not in danger of forgetting that a certain stranger bears this name, while the latter will be constantly inclined to withhold from the stranger this name which seems reserved for intimate relationships.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Being formerly astonished at the greatness of some affair, I have been made acquainted with their motives and address by those who had performed it, and have found nothing in it but very ordinary counsels; and the most common and usual are indeed, perhaps, the most sure and convenient for practice, if not for show.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

“And believe me, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” put in Nikolay Parfenovitch, in a voice of almost pathetic delight, “that every sincere and complete confession on your part at this moment may, later on, have an immense influence in your favor, and may, indeed, moreover—”
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Then we are admonished that our tribune is a tribune of true and sound ideas and from this tribune of ‘sound ideas’ is heard a solemn declaration that to call the murder of a father ‘parricide’ is nothing but a prejudice!
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Who then was to feed Paris if not the provinces?
— from History of the Commune of 1871 by Lissagaray

It will be seen that the following Poem is not a work of fiction .
— from Rand and the Micmacs by Jeremiah S. Clark

Men who would ruthlessly expose any "faked" performance if need were!
— from The Mastery of the Air by William J. Claxton

nec te meus, improbe, saltem terruit exemplo Phaëthon, qui fulmina praeceps in nostris efflavit aquis, dum flammea caeli
— from Claudian, volume 2 (of 2) With an English translation by Maurice Platnauer by Claudius Claudianus

Your sixth argument is, 'If baptism be in any sense any part of the foundation of a church, as to order (Heb 6:1,2), it must have place here or no where: why are those things called first principles, if not first to be believed and practised?
— from Works of John Bunyan — Complete by John Bunyan

For pride is near of kin to melancholy!—a hurtful obstruction from the ordinary outlets of vanity being shut.
— from The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 by Charles Lamb

If a sense for social relations is to endure, some symbol must take the place of the moving crowd, the visible stronghold, and the outspread fields and orchards that once made up his country; some intellectual figment must arise to focus political interests, no longer confined to the crops and the priest's medicinal auguries.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the authors of one's being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.
— from "Out of the East": Reveries and Studies in New Japan by Lafcadio Hearn

This first person is not real, but a fictional character.
— from My Life and My Efforts by Karl May