The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.
Firmly
Likewise the leader of any state has to do the same, he has to enforce Shariah firmly, for he will be held in account later in the afterlife if he fails.
I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
There isn’t one celebrity I’ve worked with who doesn’t have major doubts about what impact they are having. I am glad when they question the impact, because it shows they are based firmly in the reality that peacemaking isn’t the same as changing a streetlight or distributing mosquito nets.
Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.
Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted.
I want to put any number of assorted ‘ists’ – such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists – firmly in their place.
In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.