Quotes About Powerlessness

The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.

For me, addiction never really included telling myself that everything was okay. By the time I was deep in my addictions, I knew things were pretty bad and I had no control over them.

Pre?o sa ?udia chvascú, že sú citlivejÅ¡í ako zvieratá? Tým sú len bezbrannejÅ¡í; keby sme nemali iných potrieb, iba hlad a smäd a telesné túžby, boli by sme takmer slobodní; takto nás rozochveje každu?ký závan vetra, každý poh?ad, náhodné slovo.

Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.

Tuga je vrlo neobi?an osje?aj, tako smo bespomo?ni kad se s njome suo?imo. To je nešto poput prozora koji se otvara po vlastitoj volji. Soba se hladi, a mi možemo samo bespomo?no drhtati.

Tuga je vrlo neobi?an osje?aj, tako smo bespomo?ni kad se s njome suo?imo. To je nešto poput prozora koji se otvara po vlastitoj volji. Soba se hladi, a mi možemo samo bespomo?no drhtati. Me?utim, prozor se svaki put otvori malo manje, pa još manje i jednog se dana pitamo gdje je nestao.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.

On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.

Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. Men's Needs.

She felt as if she were a helpless child.

For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.

in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept the powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

There was nothing she could say to them--nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.

Apathy robbed me of the strength even to despise myself.

Dan thought of another AA aphorism: We're powerless over people, places, and things. Like most alkie nuggets, it was seventy percent true and thirty percent rah-rah bullshit.

He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat.

As a Muslim, I believe in the concept of fate, that there are certain things out of my control. Thus, what chance do I have to stand against kismet?

Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity.

Y ahí estaba. Él lo sabía. Yo lo sabía. No me quedaba nada por hacer. ¿Sabes lo difícil que es no decir nada? ¿A pesar de que hasta el último átomo de tu cuerpo se esfuerza en lo contrario?

Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary's top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They

In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough "equality" of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.

This path will lead right down into the deepest situation of human powerlessness. The follower becomes a laughingstock, scorned and taken for a fool, but a fool who is extremely dangerous to people's peace and comfort, so that he or she must be beaten, locked up, tortured, if not put to death right away. That is exactly what became of this man Jeremiah, because he could not get away from God.' - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Freedom, although it has brought [modern man] independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.