Quotes about assertion
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“And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

i.17-26
Paradise Lost (1667)

Men, God, Support, Heart

“Third is the argument from truth:
# According to Dr. Rosenberg, if naturalism is true then there are no true sentences. That is because they are all meaningless.
# But, premise (1) is true. That is what the naturalist believes and asserts.
# Therefore, naturalism is not true.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Truth, Nature

“When the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is applied to particular formal systems, we obtain as special cases: Every group, field, ordered field, etc., has a countable subsystem of the same type. A more spectacular result follows from applying the theorem to set theory (a system which we shall later formalize): There is a countable collection of sets, such that if restrict the membership relation to these sets alone, they form a model for set theory (more precisely all the true statements of set theory are true in this model). In particular, within this model which we may denote by M, there must be an uncountable set. This paradox, that a countable model can contain an uncountable set, is explained by noting that to say a set is uncountable merely asserts the nonexistence of a one-one mapping of the set with the set of integers. The "uncountable" set in M set actually has only countably many members in M, but there is no one-one correspondence \underline {within} M of this set with the set of integers.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

Set theory and the continuum hypothesis, pp. 19–20 https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4NCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA19 <br class="br">Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966)

Relation ships

“The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into this innocuous piece of journalistic emptiness.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2010s, Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins (2019)

Exercises

“I simply assert that the universe alters, is "becoming;" what it is becoming I will not venture to say. ...the individual too is altering, is not only a "being" but also a "becoming."”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

These alterations... I shall—merely for convenience—term life.
The Ethic of Freethought (Mar 6, 1883)

Universe

“Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 23, p. 170

Freedom, Personality

“In the face of all this those who continue to assert, ‘Shariah has safeguarded the rights of women like no other system of law has,’ do so only because of their confidence that no one but them has read the texts of shariah.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action), 1995

Women, Law, Confidence, Reading

“The American Revolution of 1776 was a great liberal revolution. The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, more than any documents on earth, embody the fundamentals of liberalism. These documents assert the essential equality of human beings. This does not mean, and never did, that one man is as talented, or wise, or good as another, or that each person is entitled to the same rewards. It does mean that every human being has a right to his own life; that no man may be forced to labor against his will, or to assert beliefs contrary to his conscience, or be relegated to one class of society.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 64-65

Life, Personality

“But I will not... trouble you with what I have largely discoursed in the Sceptical Chymist, to call in question the grounds on which Chymists assert, that all mixt bodies are compounded of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. For it may suffice me now to tell you that, whatsoever they may be able to obtain from other bodies, it does not appear by Experience, which is the grand, if not the onely, Argument they rely on, that all mixt bodies that have Qualities consist of their tria prima, since they have not been able, that we know, truly, and without new Compositions, to resolve into those three, either Gold, or Silver, or Crystal, or Venetian Talck, or some other bodies, that I elsewhere name; & yet these bodies are endowed with divers Qualities, as the two former with Fusibleness and Malleability, and all of them with Weight and Fixity; so that in these and the like bodies, whence Chymisats have not made it yet appear, that their Salt, Sulphur and Mercury, can be truly and adequately separated, 'twill scarce be other than precarious to derive the malleableness, colour, and other Qualities of such bodies from those Principles.”

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor

Of the Imperfection of The Chymist's Doctrine of Qualities (1675)

Question, Appearance

“Millions of Germans follow Hitler because he has proclaimed war upon the banks, upon the trusts, upon ‘loan-capital.’ He has asserted time and time again that he will abolish the rule of one class by another.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "I Saw Hitler" 1932, p. 17

War, Time

“There is - in world affairs - a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

State of the Union Address (February 2, 1952). Source: Eisenhower Presidential Library. Archived https://web.archive.org/web/20210125121539/https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/eisenhowers/quotes from the original https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/eisenhowers/quotes on January 25, 2021. <br class="br">1950s

World

“Why ridicule the act, the feeling blame,
Which from the spider would the fly reclaim;
Since from the reptile, in gradation due,
'Twould link the world in sympathy to you?
Let not this bold assertion ease thy mind,
"This all is nature, and by heav'n design'd:"
Would you not bless the arm, if stretch'd to save
Your individual carcass from the grave?
From the fierce tiger's unrelenting claw,
Or rav'nous wolf; though Nature gave the law?”

Isaac Gompertz (1774–1856)

"To the Thoughtless", p. 307
The Modern Antique; Or, The Muse in the Costume of Queen Anne (1813)

World, Law, Feeling, Nature

“Don't be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

“[S]ince vegetal fat is identical chemically with animal fat, and vegetal protein with animal protein, since these substances are found abundantly in non-flesh products, and since the only other food substances used by man (starch and sugar) are not found except in plants and plant products, it may be asserted positively that from the standpoint of food-supply there is no reason why man should prey when he eats. The plant world contains all of the compounds necessary for human alimentation, it contains them abundantly, it contains them in forms of the highest delicacy and the greatest variety and economy, and it contains them in a much more prime condition than they are found in the diseased tissues of our mistreated servants.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), What Shall We Eat?, pp. 92–93

World, Disease, Food, Animals

“Relativity is a simple concept. It asserts that the fundamental laws of physics are the same whatever your state of motion.”

Walter Isaacson book Einstein: His Life and Universe

Source: Book Einstein: His Life and Universe

Law

“Landscape, at its best, is not a narrow category. It is a source of surprise. It allows for the sudden assertion of a place, like an unexpected time signature within a melody.”

An-My Lê (1960) American photographer

Interview with the Art Newspaper (August 13, 2020)

Time

“We reject a political philosophy asserting that economic reforms can be launched over and against society, above people's heads - one that pushes democratic change aside.”

Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1927–2013) Polish politician and prime minister

"Inaugural address of Premier Tadeusz Mazowiecki" https://polishfreedom.pl/en/document/statement-inaugural-address-of-the-prime-minister-tadeusz-mazowiecki-delivered-at-the-seym-session-on-12th-september-1989 (12 September 1989)

People, Change

“Human nature asserts itself regardless of all laws, nor is there any plausible reason why nature should adapt itself to a perverted conception of morality.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), The Traffic in Women

Law, Nature

“It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.”

Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908) American art historian

As quoted in John Ruskin, Charles Eliot Norton, John Lewis Bradley, Ian Ousby (1987). “The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton”, p.175, Cambridge University Press

God

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.”

Northrop Frye book Anatomy of Criticism

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

Life, Art, Memory

“I know better than to say “that’s absurd” to someone trained in Freudian analysis, because such a therapist will simply interpret such an assertion as confirmation of whatever is proposed.”

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 9, “Sexual Abuse Hysteria” (p. 158)

Training