«The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.»

«Newman, with his clipped mustache and his whiskey-coated growl and his steely self-assurance, is an aristocrat of sleaze.»

«The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.»

«I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.»

«Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.»

«RETRIBUTION, n. A rain of fire-and-brimstone that falls alike upon the just and such of the unjust as have not procured shelter by evicting them. In the lines following, addressed to an Emperor in exile by Father Gassalasca Jape, the reverend poet appears to hint his sense of the improduence of turning about to face Retribution when it is talking exercise:What, what! Dom Pedro, you desire to go Back to Brazil to end your days in quiet? Why, what assurance have you 'twould be so?'Tis not so long since you were in a riot, And your dear subjects showed a will to fly at Your throat and shake you like a rat. You know That empires are ungrateful; are you certain Republics are less handy to get hurt in?»

«Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality»

«I hate racial discrimination most intensely and all its manifestations. I have fought all my life; I fight now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one, whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man's court. This should not be I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African, who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice.»

«Self-assurance is two-thirds of success.»

«Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow»