Quotes About Impotence

They were all lawyers, all schooled in the authority of words, though as their words turned to dust a pall of impotence and futility settled over the mission.

So when King Guy of Jerusalem (the overall ruler of the Crusader states in Outremer) refused to punish Reynald for his rampant douchebaggery, Saladin figured that it was up to him to kick this Reynald guy so hard in the gonads that his grandchildren would be born impotent.

Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.

And besides, I hate the vanity of a mind which thinks it excuses what it explains, I hate the conceit which is concerned only with itself while narrating the evil it has done, which tries to arouse pity by self-description and which, appearing indestructible among the ruins, analyses itself when it should be repenting. I hate that weakness which is always blaming others for its own impotence and which cannot see that the trouble is not in its surroundings but in itself.

You have a sense of humour. I am in favor of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.

A la pérdida del olfato (una cosa terrible, vi un documental sobre el tema el otro día. Vera, Vera, vamos, Vera, vení). A la policía. A los estadios de fútbol. A las tormentas eléctricas. A la soledad. A las muchedumbres. A la violencia. A la vejez. Al sida, al cáncer (entra en enfermedad). A la impotencia (¿entra en soledad?). A los ladrones. A la electricidad. A sufrir (entran todos los miedos juntos y se agrega el amor).

I, too, have been forced to stand close to it, and have felt the almost muscular agony of impotence before it, unable to interfere or assuage or do anything effective. Though I do—oh yes I do—believe the soul is improvable. Oh sweet and defiant hope! 5

She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear—fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion—to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.

I want you to observe...that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic—are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

He lay in darkness, like a sacrifice; he could hear the teeth of his leprosy devouring his flesh. There was a smell of contempt around him, insisting on his impotence. But his lips were bowed in a placid smile, a look of fondness, as if he had come at last to approve his disintegration.

You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Apathy is ascribed to the modest man, Fraud to the devout, Hypocrisy to the pure, Cruelty to the hero, Hostility to the anchorite, Fawning to the courteous man, Arrogance to the majestic, Garrulity to the eloquent, Impotence to the faithful. Does there exist any virtue Which escapes The slander of wicked men?

Thy chastity is but a more subtle form of corruption, and thy contempt of this world is but the impotence of thy hatred against it.

the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements' avowed cynical "realism" and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. Or, the irritating incompatibility between the actual power-of modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their own strength has established.

I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.

Sony-ils tous (...) criminels s'ils en avaient l'occasion, innocents seulement par impuisance, et prets a se servir du mal pour accomplir leur ambition? (...) La nature humaine est-elle si detestable, ou bien est-ce la royaute qui nous rend ainsi?

The gods can make a man ridiculous through a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect, impotent.

Vast organisations produce a sense of impotence in the individual, leading to a decay of effort. The danger can be averted if it is realised by administrators, but it is of a kind which most administrators are constitutionally incapable of realising. Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism, enough to prevent immobility leading to decay, but not enough to bring about disruption.