Quotes About Powerlessness

God has never been impressed with strength or self-sufficiency. In fact, he is drawn to people who are weak and admit it.

Feeling that everyone else was so much more powerful and sophisticated than he was, he had lost sight of his true values, suspended his critical faculties, and placed his trust in his superiors. His reward had been treachery. He

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

Girls often feel very powerless in their lives and their families, and they kind of mimic the male violence as a way to try and get some of that male power that they see lacking in their own lives.

That speaking the words, even if true, had little power to change the inevitable or even make him feel much better.

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

Children must be protected not because they are innocent but because they are powerless.

I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

You find yourself in the world, without any power, immovable as a rock, stupid, so to speak, as a log of wood.

You know how the Eclipse of the sun shows it? Christ's strength eclipses your powerlessness in God's likeness, and there is total darkness on your weakness.

We are the slaves of slaves

Then I discover when you take a step forward, even a small step, the fear doesn't exercise such a tight grip. It's still there but it's somehow reduced and you allow yourself to feel less of a helpless victim because ultimately it's the sense of powerlessness that does you in.

I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.

We try to hold a storm in our own fist but we are not that strong.

Nice is often just powerlessness with a smile.

Jealousy ... is the most obvious sign of impotency.

Savor powerlessness, after power, in every phase that matches it precisely; replace every old triumph with the new defeat; strengthen yourself on your weakness; win yourself back when so very lost.

You are afraid of surrender because you don't want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.

She watched his chest rise and fall and remembered and reflected. All her life things had been taken from her: Apollo, Thomas's affection, Mama and Papa, her home, her future. No one had ever asked her opinion, garnered her thoughts on what she wanted or needed. Things had been done to her, but she'd never had the chance to do things. Like a doll on a shelf, she'd been moved about, manipulated, flung aside.

We could not have been more firmly dismissed. Emerson bowed in silence, and I felt a certain … well, perhaps embarrassment is the proper word. For the first time I could see the priest's point of view. The strangers had moved into his town, told his people they were wrong, threatened his spiritual authority, and he had no recourse, for the strangers were protected by the government. A way of life centuries old was passing; and he was helpless to prevent it.

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.

But it's in that disappointment, in that confusion, in that pain—the pain that comes from things not going how I wanted them to—that I find the same thing happening, again and again. I come to the end of myself, to the end of my power, the end of my strength, the end of my understanding, only to find, in that place of powerlessness, a strength and peace that weren't there before.