Quotes About Powerless

It's easy to feel powerless in the face of a problem as big as climate change. But you're not powerless.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

What attention would death pay to his pathetic voice? He was powerless without her.

Scotland Yard men were responsible for following her—and at this point, things went badly wrong. "Whether she had left before the watch began or whether she is still there, I am powerless to say," reported an exasperated Robert Anderson. "The police [are] utterly unfit for work of this kind.

It seemed to me that there were just two possibilities. Either no God existed, or there did exist a deity who was monstrous if powerful and futile if powerless.

We want a just-my-size God, fluffy and approachable, without all those picky commandments. But once we get him down to teddy-bear size we find that he is powerless. He is not able to ease our suffering or comprehend our dark confusions; he does not have strength equal to our grief. A reduced God is no God at all.

What you did tonight was clever," Wit said. "You turned an attack into a promise. The wisest of men know that to render an insult powerless, you often need only to embrace it.

How can someone be abstractly defenseless?

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. —Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation.

Becoming a little child meant becoming aware that all is gift, that I am helpless and powerless to add a single inch to my spiritual stature. Without the subjective awareness of utter dependence, the personal consciousness of a dynamism outside of self at work in us, I seriously question whether anyone has made real progress in the spiritual life.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority;

The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb, which will answer our prayers [...] it takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. But when Rimbaud walked out the back door, doom had already announced itself.

With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart's, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it.

I'm a health nut who likes to work out every day, but I am powerless when it comes to Yorkshire pudding, pizza and ice cream.

God has always worked through the small, the insignificant, the powerless—it seems to be sewn into the very fabric of the universe.

Locking ourselves in the situation where we wish for sympathy and want to be looked at as the aggrieved party normally makes us powerless.

Are we really powerless in the face of such monstrous inner drives, or is this just a weak and cowardly characterization built by snivelers who refuse to master themselves?

If you were to ask certain of your great-great-great-grandmothers, especially those who had a reputation for shyness, they might tell you some remarkable secrets, my dear Margarita Nikolayevna! To draw a parallel—the most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough. There are some matters in which even class barriers and frontiers are powerless.

And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable.

Love makes everybody a victim because it's something you can't control. You can't control how you feel or what you're going through when you're doing it.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.