Asserting Means Quotes & Sayings

For an introvert, interacting in a group setting does mean missing out. Where there is too much input, the introvert misses his mind, his subjectivity, his freedom, his very potential. The high-stimulus social environment, the "where it's at on a Friday night," this apparent "more," becomes a prison to the introvert. He can't wait to be free - to get out and away from the noise, the talk, the interference with his inner process. — Laurie A. Helgoe

The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the 'rights' of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being 'below the line' and therefore discriminated against...Unconsciously they were using the belief that they were acting in the name of selfless moral principle simply as a cloak for asserting their ego, and as a means to enjoy feelings of moral superiority. In the cause of 'toleration' and promoting collective 'rights,' they had become possessed by a fanatical and humorless intolerance. — Christopher Booker

Baptize the nations! far and nigh,The triumphs of the cross recordThe name of Jesus glorify,Till every people call Him Lord. — James Montgomery

We are scripted to believe that reality is zero-based and that we live in a closed system. This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won't be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee that those we call 'us' will have what we call 'ours.' We call it security. We call it defense. We call it freedom. What we don't call it is what it is - fear. — Brian Zahnd

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized. — Barack Obama

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences. — Jonathan Sacks

I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things. — V.S. Naipaul

When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity ... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group. — Lewis Thomas

This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. — Patrick Rothfuss

I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. — Virginia Woolf

Hopefully by next week the classes will have paid off and I'll be cooking gourmet."
"Gourmet? From your cooking?" He pushed aside his computer, grabbed a paper plate, and started scoop0ing rice. "You shouldn't be able say those things in the same sentence. — Kristin Miller

Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre's definition: to be responsible is to "be the author of," each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom. — Irvin D. Yalom

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles - asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy. — Naomi Klein

Globalisation means many other countries are asserting themselves and trying to take over leadership. Please don't ask Americans to let others assume the leadership of human exploration. We can do wonderful science on the Moon, and wonderful commercial things. Then we can pack up and move on to Mars. — Buzz Aldrin

My work ethic I learned at Miami High, and I have taken that with me. — Udonis Haslem

Although she struggled against him, it took very little effort for him to turn the primitive weapon and bring the point of it to bear against his chest.
"If you honestly believe I'm some sort of monster," he rasped, "his gaze as fierce as she had ever seen it, "then go ahead and drive it home. My heart hasn't been my own from the first moment I laid eyes on you, so you might as well finish the job. — Teresa Medeiros

In asserting that people don't change, what she means is that they don't change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying. — A.S.A Harrison

Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife. — Rick Yancey

If we gather more and more data and establish more and more associations, however, we will not finally find that we know something. We will simply end up having more and more data and larger sets of correlations. — Kenneth Waltz

You know how easily and suddenly these things happen, beginning in playful teasing and ending in something a little warmer than friendship. You squeeze the slender arm which is passed through yours, you venture to take the little gloved hand, you say good night at absurd length in the shadow of the door. It is innocent and very interesting, love trying his wings in a first little flutter. — Arthur Conan Doyle

What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind — C. Wright Mills

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes. — Marcel Proust

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. — George Santayana