Then he answered: Promise much, and perform little; which he did.’
— from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

But in this he was deceived; for behold, there sat a man on the ground who seemed to be persuading the animals to have no fear of him, a peaceable man and Preacher-on-the-Mount, out of whose eyes kindness itself preached.
— from Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

26 Note 22 ( return ) [ He represented to the emperor of the Moguls that the four provinces, (Petcheli, Chantong, Chansi, and Leaotong,)which he already possessed, might annually produce, under a mild administration, 500,000 ounces of silver, 400,000 measures of rice, and 800,000 pieces of silk.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

"All right," quod he, and proffered me a Piece of Money with a good-natured Air; but I drew back, on which he looked surprised, gave me a second Look, slightly bent his Head, and went forth.
— from The Colloquies of Edward Osborne, Citizen and Clothworker of London by Anne Manning

"Are we to have a Paris massacre, a Paris blood-bath here in the Netherland capital?
— from PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete by John Lothrop Motley

" He also possessed maps and paper pictures.
— from Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by George Francis Dow

Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky (Etudes anthropométriques sur les voleuses et prostituées) found that professional prostitutes are imperfect beings, affected by arrest of development, generally due to morbid heredity, and present mental and physical signs of degeneracy in accord with their imperfect evolution.
— from Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence by Bernard Simon Talmey

He was passing, on the way to his province, a town that had a particularly mean and poverty-stricken look.
— from Roman life in the days of Cicero by Alfred John Church

Has a poor man always plenty of good food? Does not his work sometimes suffer from his forced abstemiousness?
— from The Priestly Vocation A Series of Fourteen Conferences Addressed to the Secular Clergy by Bernard Ward