So conspicuous, indeed, is the defectiveness of nature as a means of promoting the highest conceivable human happiness, so marked and manifold are the causes of suffering in all spheres of sentient existence, and so often do the elements seem to conspire for the destruction of mankind, raging relentlessly like a wild beast “Red in tooth and claw With ravin,” that every cosmogony has been compelled to assume the persistent intervention of some malignant spirit or perverse agency as the only rational explanation of such a condition of things.
— from The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E. P. (Edward Payson) Evans

And so, after the leaders of the entire city had been convicted, some had their feet cut off, some their hands, others their ears and noses, others their tongues and lips, and all of them were castrated and sent into exile in various distant places.
— from The Deeds of God Through the Franks by Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy Guibert

Nations have often waged war for mere conquest and ambition, which was the greatest crime that ever could have been committed.
— from Historical Romance of the American Negro by Charles Henry Fowler

X.—Certain persons say further that the Emperor Constantine, having been cleansed from leprosy by the intercession of Sylvester, then the Supreme Pontiff, gave unto the Church the seat of Empire which was -283- Rome, together with many other dignities belonging to the Empire.
— from Dante. An essay. To which is added a translation of De Monarchia. by R. W. (Richard William) Church

First: The express companies have been criminally trenching upon and into the service of the Postoffice Department for forty years or more—have been raiding what were originally intended to be the legitimate and legally protected revenues of that department.
— from Postal Riders and Raiders by W. H. Gantz

The great chemical discovery of the composition of water, accomplished during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, has been claimed as the privilege of three eminent scientific men — Cavendish, Watt, and Lavoisier.
— from Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 2 by George Grote

The only authority for the Noachian deluge assures us that, before it visited the earth, Cain had built cities; Jubal had invented harps and organs; while mankind had advanced so far beyond the neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage that Tubal-cain was a worker in iron.
— from Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions by Thomas Henry Huxley

It was something so new, so incredible, after those ten years of war, when the Emperor had been everything, and the nation had been, so to speak, in the shadow; when not a man had dared to speak or write a word without permission; when men had had no other rights than those of paying, and giving their sons as conscripts,—it was such a great matter to think that the Emperor could have been conquered, that a man like myself in the midst of his family shook his head three or four times, before daring to breathe a single word.
— from The Blockade of Phalsburg: An Episode of the End of the Empire by Erckmann-Chatrian

Corneille, instead of falling on his knees and crying peccavi when he saw his mistake, proceeded with infantine naïveté to argue the case with the wrathful poet, and prove to him that every correction had been called for by some glaring fault.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873 A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science by Various