Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned, according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely “godless.” They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: “obedient or disobedient to God.”—They went a step further: the “will of God” (in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had to be determined —and to this end they had to have a “revelation.”
— from The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

A gentleman, in a letter to Mr. Jenyns, says "a pair which frequented a tree opposite the window of one of the rooms, evinced great enmity to a couple of magpies with whom they kept up a perpetual warfare, pursuing them from branch to branch, and from tree to tree with untiring agility.
— from Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children by W. (William) Houghton

The conquests of Alexander and the extension of the Roman Empire greatly enlarged the horizon of ancient thought.
— from Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History by Auguste Sabatier