Quotes About Powerlessness

Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

Negative Confession is not a Choice of words but a Weakness

The worst pain a man can have is to know much and be impotent to act.

Under the big political umbrella, a man is just like a leaf in the ocean, with no control of his destiny and does not have any choice.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.

Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement.

I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness.

My nerves sometimes hijack my body and I am no longer in the driver's seat.

I can't handle rollercoasters. I have no control of it. It gets to me.

It's weird to have no control over something that you're involved in.

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There's no match for the silence of God.

Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In

could never explain it to anyone, the way a fear can live inside you. The way it dictates how you think and how you act, what you say, what you don't dare say.

You don't have to con­trol ev­ery­thing," she says. "You can't con­trol ev­ery­thing.

With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels. We're

Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.

They were treated to the same Randall hospitality, the travesties so routine and familiar that they were a kind of weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them. Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.

The niggers did not post sentries over their dead. Niggers did not pound on the door of the sheriff, they did not haunt the offices of the newspapermen. No sheriff paid them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories. The bodies of their loved ones disappeared into sacks and reappeared in the cool cellars of medical schools to relinquish their secrets. Every one of them a miracle, in Stevens's view, providing instruction into the intricacies of God's design.

I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed.

For Paul, being angry meant that he was like his father and therefore "bad." Splitting off his anger and rage reinforced a sense of powerlessness but also meant he was unlike his father and therefore "good.