Quotes About Powerlessness

Strength? What strength! This is a weak, flopping, sloshy, repulsive collection of nerves and ganglia. Don't even mention the word 'strength.

The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. - Jeanette Rankin

They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshire's as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm.

what an unfair advantage the dead had over the living, for there could be no rebuttal, no denial, nothing but the accusing silence of the grave.

minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.

It's just so out of control. Life, I mean. The way it flies off in all these different directions without your permission.

Third, Yahweh also speaks of exposing the powerlessness of the nations' so-called gods and the uselessness of their so-called insight and capacity to decide what will happen in the world (e.g., Is 19:1-17).

I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...

It is extraordinarily difficult not to hate someone when one feels powerless with them.

how did she, Ellen Chesser, ever come to such a state of need that a person outside herself, some other being, not herself, some person free to go and come and risk accidents far from herself, should hold the very key to her life and breath in his hand?

Love... It only serves to make one weak...

Under the idea that we can all make our own fates, that we have choices, is the reminder that sometimes we don't. That sometimes life is bigger than our plans. Bigger than us.

Politics on Plato's terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle's terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.

Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don't know what it feels like to be free. We aren't free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn't even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

I would if I could …I think… but I can't …she. ..I… have made sure of that

You can't order the waves to be silent, madame," Baldanders told her. "They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.

When you lose control of your body, you have just about lost all you have in this world.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

Having a child with Autism can mess with your head: You feel like you can move mountains for them yet you're powerless at the same time.

They say that at that moment you didn't do this, you didn't do that, but at that time I didn't have the means. I didn't have an army to stop the killings. I'm not Moses, I can't do miracles.

It was frustrating because I didn't do anything, ... I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and he decided to punish me. I couldn't do anything about it.

Alberto pensó súbitamente, en el bautizo de los perros. Por primera vez, después de tres años, sentía esa sensación de impotencia y humillación radical que había descubierto al ingresar al colegio. Sin embargo, ahora era todavía peor: al menos, el bautizo se compartía.