Quotes About Powerlessness

We come up against our powerlessness and often our first response is If I were just more powerful Ã¢â'¬Â¦ But this isn't an obstacle we power through, it's a truth we make peace with. I was starting to learn that Ã¢â'¬Â¦

A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don't try too much in life, if we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable.

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

May the arm of the first member of Congress, who proposes a national religion, drop powerless from his shoulder; his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth and all the people say amen.

It had never occurred to Teacher Gu that he and his wife were to pay for the bullet that would take their daughter's life, but why question such absurdity when it was not his position to ask?

Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won't be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

To defeat your adversary and bury him is one thing. To dress him in a jester's costume and have him perform for you is another, more crushing blow. He survives to give witness to his own powerlessness."16 This is what both Chaplin and Brooks did to Hitler.

We learned that it takes months, even years, to see some ideas take shape. Above all, we recognized that caring for others is very hard to do if you don't see yourself as capable of being helpful to them. There is a terrible and seemingly pointless pain in powerless caring, and it erodes the capacity for affection. To hear a story and be faced with either ignoring it or being a martyr to everyone else's woes are the usual choices available. A school that is a community has other possibilities.

The agreement an Indian makes to a United States treaty, is like the agreement a buffalo makes with his hunter when pierced with arrows. All he can do is lie down and give in.

Taking responsibility for change means overcoming the inertia and feeling of powerlessness on a personal level. People can grow and change if they are personally willing to confront and unlearn their racist conditioning (Kiselica, 1999; Sue, 2003; Winter, 1977).

But when he smiled, I still felt seven years old and about three inches tall.

Jack. He'd never give us a phone, or a window. Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. We're like people in a book, and he won't let anybody else read it.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

women are the only group in history to be idealized into powerlessness

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

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale," who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence—briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing—cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.

As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power.

To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.

Bu muskan?n gizli güçler ta??d???na hiç mi hiç inanmad?m, fakat insan yazg? kar??s?nda öylesine güçsüz ki böyle gizemli nesnelere ilgi duymaktan kendini alam?yor. Beni böylesine güçsüz yaratm?? ulu tanr?m, bir gün beni güçsüzlüÄŸümden kurtaracak m??

The impotence of God is infinite.

About as defiant as a girl can be with her mouth gagged, her arms pinned and her legs spread wide open

I lost feeling for about five seconds. Everything. Head to toe. Times ten. You just sit there in no control. I was in no control, I was at a higher power's mercy. You're just sitting there, all of a sudden your body feels like it weighs like two million pounds.

Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.