"I consider Mr. Tyke an exemplary man—none more so—and I believe him to be proposed from unimpeachable motives.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Taxes on land or corn, especially when they are excessive, lead to two results so fatal in their effect that they cannot but depopulate and ruin, in the long run, all countries in which they are established.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

On the opening of the synod, the place of honor in the centre was claimed by the temporal and ecclesiastical chiefs; and it was only by alleging that his predecessors had not assisted in person at Nice or Chalcedon, that Eugenius could evade the ancient precedents of Constantine and Marcian.
— 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

Only this dumb, woful face seems to belong to and end with the night.
— from Life in the Iron-Mills; Or, The Korl Woman by Rebecca Harding Davis

—Cicero, De Offic., iii. 17.] insomuch that the sage Dandamis, hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, judged them to be great men every way, excepting that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which, to second and authorise, true virtue must abate very much of its original vigour; many vicious actions are introduced, not only by their permission, but by their advice: “Ex senatus consultis plebisquescitis scelera exercentur.”
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

But I am particularly indebted to an edition of the French translation of this chapter, with additional notes, by one of the most learned civilians of Europe, Professor Warnkonig, published at Liege, 1821.
— 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

For ‘tis an envious thing, with cunning interlined. V.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man; he was so far from having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that he had relinquished them of his own will, thrown himself on a world with no favour in it, won his own private place there, and earned his own bread.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

He was a sneak and a thief, a mischief-maker, a fomenter of trouble; and irate squaws told him to his face, the while he eyed them alert and ready to dodge any quick-flung missile, that he was a wolf and worthless and bound to come to an evil end.
— from White Fang by Jack London

Here we enter on a new sphere where two kinds of determinations constitute the chief points of interest; these are everywhere treated of in the many Socratic schools which were being formed, and though not by Plato and Aristotle, they were specially so by the Stoics, the new Academy, &c. That is to say, the one point is determination itself in general, the criterion; and the second is what determination for the subject is.
— from Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Italy had been lost as rapidly as it had been won; the stroke of Marlborough at Ramilies had been re-echoed at Turin; and Eugene had expelled the French arms from Piedmont as effectually as Marlborough had from Flanders.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 by Various

The gallantly-borne but cruel retreat came to an end.
— from The Woman of Mystery by Maurice Leblanc

Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness, and of that only, is all this confusion tending.
— from Past and Present Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. by Thomas Carlyle

So far, good; but the arme blanche , as we might expect, is not going to be suppressed in this summary fashion, and when we pass from pious generalization to the actual "crisis," which "offers the greatest opportunities for Cavalry action," we breathe once more the intoxicating atmosphere of the great shock-charge, not against Cavalry [Pg 157] now (for they are ex hypothesi extinct), but against Infantry and Artillery.
— from German Influence on British Cavalry by Erskine Childers

I am not personally concerned, as I never tried an experiment on a living animal, nor am I a physiologist; but I know enough to see how ruinous it would be to stop all progress in so grand a science as Physiology.
— from More Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 2 A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters by Charles Darwin

They are not instrumentalities; they are not devices to facilitate exchanges; they are the things exchanged for something else; and other things are exchanged for them.
— from The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Complete Contents Dresden Edition—Twelve Volumes by Robert Green Ingersoll

Having proved that the part of the moon that shines consists of water, which mirrors the body of the sun and reflects the radiance it receives from it; and that, if these waters were devoid of waves, it would appear small, but of a radiance almost like the sun; —[5] It must now be shown whether the moon is a heavy or a light body: for, if it were a heavy body—admitting that at every grade of distance from the earth greater levity must prevail, so that water is lighter than the earth, and air than water, and fire than air and so on successively—it would seem that if the moon had density as it really has, it would have weight, and having weight, that it could not be sustained in the space where it is, and consequently that it would fall towards the centre of the universe and become united to the earth; or if not the moon itself, at least its waters would fall away and be lost from it, and descend towards the centre, leaving the moon without any and so devoid of lustre.
— from The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by da Vinci Leonardo

In this order there is no exception, and therefore, as far as I can judge, it includes all officers both civil and military, from the Lord High Chancellor to a justice of peace, and from the general to an ensign:
— from The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. — Volume 06 The Drapier's Letters by Jonathan Swift

Much spoil went with them, and more had gone before them, and each man went with a promise and a command to return with many men like himself to aid the king before the walls of Calais.
— from With the Black Prince by William O. Stoddard