Quotes About Powerlessness

Computers can bully us. A slow and unreliable system will bring even the toughest soul to their knees as they find themselves completely defenseless against the erratic whims of their rogue machine.

As an actor, you do feel very powerless... you are at the whim of the agent who submits you for a project, and then at the audition, you are at the whim of the casting director who will cast you or not.

The ghastly thing about being a producer is that, once the curtain goes up, there is nothing you can do. At least when you are in it, you have some measure of control. If something goes wrong, you can maybe put it right. When you are in the audience, there is nothing you can do.

'The Darkest Minds' came from a period in my life where I felt my most powerless, when I was a teenager.

Twelve-step programs require people to accept their powerlessness and turn their lives over to God or another higher power. Many adolescents question religion, and in general teenagers aren't going to turn their lives over to anyone.

Then he shrieked. In his hand the wooden shaft suddenly writhed. Its rigid outline became pliant, melting in his grasp. He tried to throw it from him, but it was too late. He held a living serpent in his naked hand, and already it had coiled about his wrist and its wicked wedge-shaped head darted at his muscular arm. He screamed again and his eyes became distended, his features purple. He went to his knees shaken by an awful convulsion, and then lay still.

La ira ?dijo Merlín? es tan sólo una expresión de la cólera. Hay desesperación, depresión, indefensión, desesperanza y, desde luego, impotencia. Todas las cosas que vos habéis sentido controladas por los hombres.

He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.

We feel the machine slipping from our handsas if someone else were steering;if we see the light at the end of the tunnel,it's the light of the oncoming train.

Lack of self-worth is the fundamental source of all emotional pain. A feeling of insecurity, unworthiness and lack of valueis the core experience of powerlessness.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. You can will what you want, but you can't will what you will

Agitaion over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not occured, or else are occuring at an inaccesible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the onoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the object of our distress.

Un conto è non far niente. Un conto è non poter far niente-

If you can't understand these paradoxes – the ways in which symbolic powerlessness can empower and symbolic cruelty can sensitize – please sit down and think them through carefully.

An intelligent English traveller has characterized as the most miserable and degraded of all beings, "a masterless slave." And is not the condition of the laboring poor of other countries too often that of masterless slaves?

Resistance to painful information on the grounds that we cannot do anything about it springs less from powerlessness (as measured by our capacity to effect change) than from the fear of feeling powerless.

People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person - the little person down here on the earth - be that?

You'd better be careful then,' said friend, which was what everybody said. People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person – the little person down here on the earth – be that?

You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. "And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.

Don't you know you can't do anything about people?

Don't you know you can't do anything about people?

Ah, l'orrore di morire! E trovare il mistero faccia a faccia senza poter evitarlo, senza potere...

My biggest fears I can't talk about. And my biggest fear is that those fears happen, and I can't stop it.

I can't enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole, I see that things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree.