By the gifts which came to them—after months of delay, sometimes—not only from their own kinsfolk but from unknown benefactors, school children, convents, societies, and all classes of men and women, they knew that their sufferings were understood and that throughout the country there was a great prayer going up— from freethinkers as well as from Catholic souls—that the soldiers of France might be blessed with victory and that they might have the strength to endure the cruelties of war.
— from The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

I think I’ll give up farming for a while and go to the city and work.
— from The Camp Fire Girls at Onoway House; Or, The Magic Garden by Hildegard G. Frey

dost thou grant us fairer fields, and wider, for the whirlwind to lay waste?
— from Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection by Walter Savage Landor

But, as every fair-minded observer would admit, nothing could have been more certain than that the political restoration of the "late rebel States" as self-governing bodies on the North Carolina plan would, at that time, have put the whole legislative and executive power of those States into the hands of men ignorant of the ways of free labor society, who sincerely believed that the negro would not work without physical compulsion and was generally unfit for freedom, and who were then pressed by the dire necessities of their impoverished condition to force out of the negroes all the agricultural labor they could with the least possible regard for their new rights.
— from McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 by Various