The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
John Charles Polanyi

The toddler must say no in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says no to assert who she is not.
Louise J. Kaplan

There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.
Hermann Hesse

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings?
Charles de Secondat

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
Albert Camus

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Albert Camus

To suppose more than one supreme Source of infinite wisdom, power, and all perfections, is to assert that there is no supreme Being in existence.
Adam Clarke

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
Mark Rothko

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley

We want to assert the very principle that truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.
John Howard

What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.
Tom G. Palmer

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.
Dennis Potter