Should anyone be so presumptuous as to assert it, he argued impassionedly, one should proceed against him "not with arguments but otherwise".
The nature of terrorism has itself become a philosophically debated question, some philosophers going so far as to assert that terrorism is justified in some real-world circumstances.
Absurdly, as if conceding the impossibility of ever being Mr. Godard, Mr. Bertolucci went so far as to assert: "I am Marcello, and I make fascist films and I want to kill Godard who is a revolutionary".
And in a blog posting on the company website on Monday, Mr. Musk went so far as to assert that Tesla asked federal regulators to conduct the safety investigation to allay any fears about electric cars.
Commenting recently in The Guardian, the writer David Dennis went so far as to assert that unpaid internships were "ruining journalism" by squeezing out the voices of those with "mid- to lower-class backgrounds".
While many non-Separatists withdrew and established a worship of their own, they would not go so far as to assert that the parish churches were devoid of all marks of a true church.
Romania had a group of energetic young Dadaists (the show's catalog goes so far as to assert that Dada originated in Bucharest), including Victor Brauner, who would go on to become a Surrealist based in France.
Although Mr. Gates did not go so far as to assert that what was good for Microsoft was good for America, he generally outlined a view that his company has been an engine of progress, which is now in peril.
Friends and major donors insist that Mrs. Clinton is sincere in expressing ambivalence about seeking the presidency again, and they go so far as to assert that she is simply happy to have time to clean out her closets for the first time in decades.
Paul Keyser, a software developer at I.B.M. and the author of "Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era," told me recently, "Those scholars who study the history of science tend to focus on science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and Harvey, and often go so far as to assert that no such thing existed before".
