“These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, "We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something.”

Source: Lord of the Flies

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 32 (p. 339)

Glamorama (1998)

Source: The Choice

Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in J. C. D. Clark, 'Introduction', in Clark (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 66.
1790s

The Time of the Turning
Song lyrics, OVO (2000)

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 25
Context: That had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment — not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.
It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death or misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.
Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.

Source: The Long Walk

"Bright College Days"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)