Sophronia herself supposed she was an orphan; but Mr Swiveller, putting various slight circumstances together, often thought Miss Brass must know better than that; and, having heard from his wife of her strange interview with Quilp, entertained sundry misgivings whether that person, in his lifetime, might not also have been able to solve the riddle, had he chosen.
— from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
— from The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels

Poverty, pressure of business, mistaken social prejudices, none of these can excuse a man from his duty, which is to support and educate his own children.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Did I not often in days of old, before my servant Plato lived, wage stern warfare with the rashness of folly?
— from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

To this end, in November, 1876, an earnest appeal was sent out by Mrs. Stanton, president; Miss Anthony, secretary; and Mrs. Gage, chairman of the executive committee of the National Association, asking the women to secure petitions for the amendment 484 and send them to the annual meeting.
— from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years by Ida Husted Harper

If I must cogitate something as existing necessarily as the basis of existing things, and yet am not permitted to cogitate any individual thing as in itself necessary, the inevitable inference is that necessity and contingency are not properties of things themselves—otherwise an internal contradiction would result; that consequently neither of these principles are objective, but merely subjective principles of reason—the one requiring us to seek for a necessary ground for everything that exists, that is, to be satisfied with no other explanation than that which is complete a priori, the other forbidding us ever to hope for the attainment of this completeness, that is, to regard no member of the empirical world as unconditioned.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped lashes, while he sat in fascinated contemplation of the way in which her hands went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen a pair of birds make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were building.
— from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance; and I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience.
— from State of the Union Addresses by Andrew Jackson

But in her costume the two articles that most surprised Madame de Hell were an embroidered cambric handkerchief and a pair of black mittens, significant proofs that the products of the French loom found their way even to the toilet of a Kalmuk lady.
— from Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century by W. H. Davenport (William Henry Davenport) Adams

She ran up to me that morning at the gate, her face beaming and her hand held out, and when she was close to me, and I drew away from her, she began the most profuse apologies: she was very near-sighted, and she had mistaken me for an old acquaintance she had not seen for some time; then she kept on by my side, prattling about her "mamma," who had not been able to leave the hotel since they came; of her dread of being alone, and her eagerness to see the Fair.
— from Against Odds: A Detective Story by Lawrence L. Lynch

In his trades with other boys, money seldom plays any part, and the little swindler always believes he has got the best of the bargain.
— from Confessions of Boyhood by John Albee