“Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.”

Source: The Black Prince

Letter to Fisher. (Merriman, i. p. 376.)

Asinaria, Act I, scene 3.
Asinaria (The One With the Asses)

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)
Context: Bob Dole and Jack Kemp declared that the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln. But just what is the connection between the Republican Party of 1860 and that of 1996? The essence of slavery, Lincoln said, was expressed in the proposition: "You work; I'll eat." Upon his election as president, he was besieged by office seekers who drove him to distraction. Lincoln was blunt in his judgment of the great majority of them. They wanted to eat without working. Lincoln saw the demand for the protection of slavery and the demand for government sinecures to be at bottom one and the same. The origin of all constitutional rights, according to Lincoln, was the right that a man had to own himself, and therefore to own the product of his own labor. Government exists to protect that right, and to regulate property only to make it more valuable to its possessors.

The Human: Truth and Consequences (p. 27)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Knox to a local officer while taking cannon to Boston. Reported in David McCullough, 1776 (2005), p. 83.

Preface.
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717)
Context: I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.