"... A man would blush to say to himself in the darkness of the night the things he stands up on a platform in the garish light of day to stuff into the ears of a multitude whose intelligence he pretends that he esteems.... Therefore, why be sapient and solemn about it, like an editorial in a newspaper?" Nick added, with a smile.
2010, (w), Hitch-22, Atlantic 2011, p. 217:
In Europe I had been told by sapient academics that there wasn't really any class system in the United States: well, you couldn't prove that by the conditions in California's agribusinesses, or indeed its urban factories.
c. 1605, (w), (w), Act III, Scene 6, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=kinglear&Scope=entire&pleasewait=1&msg=pl
To Edgar Come, sit thou here, most learned justicer. / To the Fool Thou, sapient sir, sit here.
1674, (w), (w), Book 9, lines 439-43, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26/pg26-images.html
Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned / Or of revived Adonis, or renowned / Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son, / Or that, not mystic, where the sapient king / Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
1839, "Bewitched Butter" in (w) (ed.), Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (1892), Barnes & Noble, 2009, p. 295,
She had five or six cows; but it was observed by her sapient neighbors that she sold more butter every year than other farmers' wives who had twenty.