Turning to Russia and Ukraine, he didn't quite declare victory over Vladimir Putin, but he came pretty close, mocking those who suggested, following Russia's annexation of Crimea last year, that Putin had outmaneuvered the West.
This week the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph did not quite declare war on the Cameron government, but their response to the child benefit cut shows that they are quite willing to give it a hammering on certain issues.
Edwin Aldrin would just have been the second guy on the moon; Buzz Aldrin is the ur-spaceman, if not quite declaring, "To infinity and beyond", convinced that eventually we can get pretty close.
Adem's songs envelop you slowly: he deliberately underplays his lovely tunes, and his lyrics often hint at passion ("I'm one in a million/ Got to try to be more") without quite declaring it.
As she knocks back and forth between the Paris of Possibility and the London of Dull Certainty, devoting huge and pointless thought to suitors who never quite declare themselves (most probably because they aren't suitors in the first place), she becomes the ghost of her own tale and a symptom of her author's malaise.
But they want a fight to overthrow Assad's "tyranny" – which is not quite the declared goal of Washington's Isis strategy.
To understand why, we need to go back over fifty years to a time when the right was shut out of power, when Lionel Trilling could quite comfortably declare that "nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation".
Others disagreed with this (sometimes quite emphatically) declaring that it's "bad medicine" (oncology) to only see problems in your specialty, and that "people should not live in a silo of I'm only treating xyz" (anesthesiology).
Gwen was the sister of Augustus John, who declared, quite correctly, that she was the better painter.
"This is the best team Augsburg have had in 100 years," the president Klaus Hofmann declared, quite rightly.
