Insisting Quotes
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference? Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation? Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is a considerable point in all good legislation to determine exactly the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of a crime. Every reasonable man, everyone, that is, whose ideas have a certain interconnection and whose feelings accord with those of other men, may be a witness. The true measure of his credibility is nothing other than his interest in telling or not telling the truth; for this reason it is frivolous to insist that women are too weak [to be good witnesses], childish to insist...
Cesare Beccaria
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
Germaine Greer
He would insist, too, on being present at the weighing which occured at the beginning of every term. The whole school would be required to sit, naked, one by one on a red velvet weighing machine under the direction of the matron, while the headmaster smoked his pipe ruminatively above. He also insisted on supervising sixth form showers, which was slightly odd, as this as not the sort of task headmasters normally undertake...I have no reason to suppose there was anything in the slightest bit...
Auberon Waugh
Ozzie Boone... insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.
Dean Koontz