But the provision is unequal to the task; the means either cannot or will not accomplish the end, and the whole affair is a felo de se; for as the greater weight will always carry up the less, and as all the wheels of a machine are put in motion by one, it only remains to know which power in the constitution has the most weight, for that will govern; and though the others, or a part of them, may clog, or, as the phrase is, check the rapidity of its motion, yet so long as they cannot stop it, their endeavors will be ineffectual; the first moving power will at last have its way, and what it wants in speed is supplied by time.
— from Common Sense by Thomas Paine

The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or so of people in the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced no more effect upon her.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy

As some people imagine they can hasten the sun, so others fancy they can jog the tardy moon.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

When told it was to be a tiled court with plants in the centre, he turned to Irene: “Waste this on plants?
— from The Forsyte Saga, Volume I. The Man Of Property by John Galsworthy

When be observed that the channel of the river, which flows through the city when it is swollen by the winter rains, was at that time nearly dry and did not reach up to the wall, and would thus afford his soldiers a passage by which to penetrate into the city, he took the body-guards, the shield-bearing guards, the archers, and Agrianians, and made his way secretly into 209 the city along the channel, at first with a few men, while the barbarians had turned their attention towards the military engines and those who were assailing them in that quarter.
— from The Anabasis of Alexander or, The History of the Wars and Conquests of Alexander the Great by Arrian

Another idea is that they were used as confessionals, the priest in the church hearing the confession of the penitent who knelt on the grass in the churchyard.
— from English Villages by P. H. (Peter Hampson) Ditchfield

* * * * * * Is it strange, then, that those of us who are allowed once more to face the front, and go personally into the conflict hand to hand, are looking Northward for supplies?
— from The American Missionary, Volume 34, No. 11, November 1880 by Various

It was said that Jonathan Sewell, Chief Justice, had traitorously and wickedly endeavored to subvert the constitution by the introduction of an arbitrary, tyrannical government against law; that the said Jonathan Sewell had disregarded the authority of Parliament, and usurped its powers by making regulations subversive of the constitution and the laws; that Jonathan Sewell had libellously published such Rules of Practice; that Jonathan Sewell had substituted his own will for the will of the legislature; that Jonathan Sewell being Chief Justice, Speaker of the Legislative Council, and Chairman of the Executive Council, had maliciously slandered the Canadian subjects of the King and the House of Assembly, and had poisoned and incensed the mind of Sir James H. Craig, the Governor-in-Chief, and had so misled and deceived him that he did on the 15th of May, 1809, dissolve the parliament, without any cause whatever to palliate or excuse the measure, the said Governor-in-Chief having been at the same time advised to make a speech in gross violation of the rights of the Assembly, grossly insulting to its members, and misrepresenting their conduct; that to prevent opposition to his tyrannical views the said Jonathan Sewell had counselled and advised Sir James Henry Craig to remove and dismiss divers loyal and deserving subjects, from offices of profit and emolument—now the head and front of Mr. Sewell's offending has come nebulously to light—without the semblance of reason to justify it; that to mark his contempt for the representatives of the people and for the constitution, he had procured the dismissal of Jean Antoine Panet, Esquire, who then was, and for fifteen years preceding had been Speaker of the Assembly, from his rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the militia, without any reason to palliate or excuse the injustice; that he had induced P. E. Desbarats, the law printer, to establish a newspaper styled the "Vrai Canadien," for the purpose of vilifying such members of the Assembly as were obnoxious to him; that with the view of extinguishing the liberty of the press, and destroying, therefore, effectually, the rights, liberty, and security of His Majesty's subjects in the province, and suppressing all complaint of oppression, he had, in March, 1810, advised and approved the sending of an armed force to break open the dwelling house and printing office of one Charles Lefrançois, there to arrest and imprison him, and seize and bring away a printing press, with various private papers, which measure of lawless violence was accordingly executed, the said press and papers being then in the Court House of Quebec, with the knowledge and approbation of the said Jonathan Sewell; that Jonathan Sewell had advised the arrest of Messrs. Bedard, Blanchet and Taschereau, upon an unfounded pretext; that Jonathan Sewell had instigated the oppression of the old and infirm François Corbeil, by which the old man lost his life; that Jonathan Sewell had instigated Sir James Henry Craig to issue a proclamation causing the public to believe that Mr. Bedard had been guilty of treason, and that the province was in a state approaching to open rebellion; that Jonathan Sewell had read the wicked proclamation in the Court House, to influence the Grand and Petty Juries; that Jonathan Sewell had abused his powers simply with the view of paving the way for American predominance in Canada; that with the view of annexing Canada to the United States he had entered into a base and wicked conspiracy with one John Henry, an adventurer of suspicious character, for the purpose of sowing dissension among the subjects of the government of the United States, and producing a dismemberment of the Union; and had given artful advice to Sir James Craig, inducing him to send Henry, the adventurer, on a secret mission, which had exposed His Majesty's government to imputations reflecting on its honor, and that he had labored to promote disunion between the legislative Council and Legislative Assembly, and had fomented dissensions in the province to prevent a reliance on the loyalty and bravery of His Majesty's Canadian subjects.
— from The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation Volume 1 by Charles Roger

At this point in the conversation Honora thought that her curiosity had gone far enough.
— from Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Winston Churchill by Winston Churchill

as a relative —its especial use as the restrictive relative —the frequent employment of, by Addison, wrongly criticised by BLAIR —as a relative, in what cases more appropriate than who or which — That , ellipt., repeating the import of the preceding words, (" And THAT," —[Greek: kai tauta],) — That , in the phrases in that , &c., how to be reckoned — That , as introducing a dependent clause, how to be ranked —as introducing a sent.
— from The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown

And mixing her greens and browns with just a dash of yellow, she paints them all so skilfully that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of clay, or against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, each sits as securely as Perseus in the charmed helmet that made him invisible.
— from Wild Life Near Home by Dallas Lore Sharp

“Why, I mean poor people in the city has to pay for apples, an’ in the country people don’t have to pay for ’em, but it don’t do no good, because they have their own trees.”
— from Minerva's Manoeuvres: The Cheerful Facts of a "Return to Nature" by Charles Battell Loomis

II) that authors of any one of the countries shall enjoy in the other countries the same rights as natives, on complying with the formalities prescribed in the country of origin, i. e. , of first publication, or in case of simultaneous publication, in the country having the shortest term of protection, for a period not exceeding the term of protection granted in the country of origin.
— from Copyright: Its History and Its Law by R. R. (Richard Rogers) Bowker