Quotes About Powerlessness

When you are an actor, you are in the most powerless position in this business.

When you have a child who wants to take his own life and you feel powerless, nothing else in life matters.

If there's something I hate the most, it's feeling helpless, powerless.

I think a lot of women have felt really powerless.

I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.

No one has it easy, and to some degree, everyone feels lonely and powerless, which may cause them to make hurtful decisions.

If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.

I could hear them yell and laugh each time and there was nothing I could do about it…. I saw them do it, like you're shooting gophers. I could hear them: 'Wow, I got one!' Those guys were murderers." Such

It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

In an attempt to cope with their childhood abandonment experiences, all Nice Guys developed the same paradigm: "If I am good, then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life." Unfortunately, this paradigm not only produces the opposite of what is desired, it guarantees nothing but feelings of perpetual powerlessness.

It is only when we start understanding on an emotional level, on a gut level, that we were powerless to do anything any differently than we did that we can Truly start to Love ourselves.

Cultures have norms that reflect centuries of shared beliefs and ideals. Do not expect to scoff at such things with impunity. You will be punished somehow, even if just through isolation — a position of real powerlessness.

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. For this reason we become attracted to certain narratives: it is genetics that determines much of what we do; we are just products of our times; the individual is just a myth; human behavior can be reduced to statistical trends.

All right, then. If she wants to be like that, there's nothing I can do.

There seem to be no way he could stop anything that was happening, although it all felt wrong.

She hated the powerlessness. The feeling of weakness always lurking beneath the surface, making her confidence seem phony, making her feel like a fraud. Other people in her profession went about the whir of life so nonchalantly, and their ease had always felt alien to her. It made her feel estranged from everyone else. How could people see what they saw—especially social workers and beat cops who saw everything—and not be consumed with anger all the time? How did they do it? Tara

Resistance, however, is useless. (1939)

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Well, now I know I can control my tongue, my temper, and my appetites, but that's it. I have no effect on weather, traffic, or luck. I can't make good things happen. I can't keep anybody safe. I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past. What a relief.

What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.

How weak and fruitless must be any word of mine.

Powerlessness became 'goodness', baseness 'humility', submission to people one hated 'obedience' and, in Nietzsche's phrase, not-being-able to-take-revenge' turned into 'forgiveness'. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem 'a voluntary achievement. something wanted. chosen. a deed, an accomplishment.