What is swear?

Famous quotes containing the word swear:

“I never yet feared those men who set a place apart in the middle of their cities where they gather to cheat one another and swear oaths which they break.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)

“The late Président de Montesquieu told me that he knew how to be blind—he had been so for such a long time—but I swear that I do not know how to be deaf: I cannot get used to it, and I am as humiliated and distressed by it today as I was during the first week. No philosophy in the world can palliate deafness.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

“Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?”
—Matthew Prior (1664–1721)