To prohibit, by a perpetual law, the importation of foreign corn and cattle, is in reality to enact, that the population and industry of the country shall, at no time, exceed what the rude produce of its own soil can maintain.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

To those that could produce any instance of their having deserved well of the Roman people, he presented the freedom of Latium, or even that of the City.
— from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete by Suetonius

Firstly, if pleasure only exists as it is felt, the belief that every pleasure and pain has a definite intensive quantity or degree must remain an a priori assumption, incapable of positive empirical verification.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

In fact, it can take place in every sort of way, since there is not one of those things which are seen which testifies against this world in which we cannot detect any extremity; and that such worlds are infinite in number is easily seen, and also that such a world can exist both in the world and in the μετακόσμιον, as we call the space between the worlds, being a huge space made up of plenum and vacuum, but not, as some philosophers pretend, an immensity of space absolutely empty.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

Herod was now prepared to hear any thing in her Prejudice, and immediately ordered her Servant to be stretch'd upon the Rack; who in the Extremity of his Tortures confest, that his Mistress's Aversion to the King arose from something 6 Sohemus had told her; but as for any Design of poisoning, he utterly disowned the least Knowledge of it.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

For it is a fundamentally immoral play, it dispenses with the moral responsibility of men, it portrays godlike powers as instigators of guilt, and shows the helplessness of the moral impulses of men which contend against sin.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

He had a French play, an Italian opera, grand and comic, and twenty Italian dancers, all of whom had been principal dancers in Italian theatres.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

But besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste, which genius confesses.
— from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Cosmas affords some interesting knowledge of the port and inscription of Adulis, (Topograph.
— 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

The lord who was too poor to create a court of sufficient power and importance obtained assistance from his lord paramount or relinquished the right of justice to him; whence originated the saying, "The fief is one thing, and justice another."
— from Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period by P. L. Jacob

There he caused his presence to be certified by a notarial act, then fled precipitately, and put an interval of several hours between his departure and the pursuit of the Kings of France and Sicily."
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848 by Various

When people are ill, or recovering from illness, they seem to guess things in a way that is sometimes quite astonishing, and so it was with Maudie.
— from Hoodie by Mrs. Molesworth

Caucus, failure of congressional nominating, 247 ; legislative, disciplines parties in Congress, 326 , 327 ; invention of, by Democrats, 327 , 328 ; privacy and irresponsibility of legislative, 328 , 329 ; methods and constraints of legislative, 329 , 330 ; necessity for legislative, 330 .
— from Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics by Woodrow Wilson

That is but a single phase and indicative of physical rather than moral qualities; or, perhaps, merely the callousness born of long exposure to danger.
— from Frenzied Finance, Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated by Thomas William Lawson

“Tusk, boy!” answered Wolfe, “all men have their vain points, and I own that I am not ill pleased that these rugged features should be assigned, even in fancy, to one of the noblest of those me
— from The Disowned — Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

But neither good and pertinent reasons, nor the charm of eloquence in the mouth of a pleasing and able woman, are sufficient to make head against the passions and interests of the actors who are at a given moment in possession of the political arena; it needs time, a great deal of time, before the unjust or unreasonable requirements and determinations of a people, a generation, and the chief of a state become acknowledged as such and abandoned.
— from A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 by François Guizot

It ought here to be remarked, that this mode of conviction not only concludes the party has failed in his expurgatory proof, but it is sufficient also to subject to the penalties and incapacities of the law the infant upon whose account the person has been so convicted.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12) by Edmund Burke

Isn't it the preservation and immutability of existing borders?
— from After the Rain : how the West lost the East by Samuel Vaknin

Whatever mistakes thou mayst have made in the choice of a profession and in other things, it is still possible for thee to will and do good, to know truth, and to love beauty, and this is the best life can give.
— from Means and Ends of Education by John Lancaster Spalding

And so the opponents of the decree must know at last that they have to deal with a blind and unscrupulous zeal, not with a theological system carefully thought out and placed on an intellectual basis; that the contest has to be carried on against the whole power and influence of the Pope, and not, as had been maintained with transparent hypocrisy, only against the wishes of the noisy and independent party of the Civiltà and its allied journalists.
— from Letters From Rome on the Council by Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger