Top 100 Powerless Quotes
#1. Never break a Muslim's heart by refusing what he offers you, when you know that anything that comes to you through him is in reality from Allah, and he is only His powerless and compelled means.
Abdullah Ibn Alawi Al-Haddad
#2. A great many people, he had noticed, spent large parts of their time worrying about things they were powerless to alter. Had they concentrated all this energy on things they could influence, think how different their lives would be.
Diane Setterfield
#3. Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#4. Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Blaise Pascal
#5. God has always worked through the small, the insignificant, the powerless - it seems to be sewn into the very fabric of the universe.
Stephen R. Lawhead
#6. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
George Orwell
#7. Money is not going to organize the disadvantaged, the powerless, or the poor. We need other weapons. That's why the War on Poverty is such a miserable failure. You put out a big pot of money and all you do is fight over it. Then you run out of money and you run out of troops.
Cesar Chavez
#8. There was no better way to feel powerful than to make others feel powerless.
Chris Dietzel
#9. Life needed a fast forward button. Because there were days you just don't want to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it.
Sara Zarr
#10. In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.
Jay Parini
#11. We are nearly powerless in our own time, and with our skills, but power will come to future generations, power to harm and to heal. Our task is to observe and record with absolute honesty, to provide fertile soil for the healing power to grow uncorrupted.
Timothy Cook
#12. In that way, as an actor in particular, you're powerless. And so in that way as an actor in particular you can't make mistakes.
Jake Gyllenhaal
#13. Casting people as victims works very effectively to keep them powerless. By keeping them focussed on all the bad in their lives, it leaves them eaten up with resentment for an entire lifetime and prevents them from taking those first steps toward an exceptional life.
Genevieve Davis
#14. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
Chinua Achebe
#15. For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.
Plato
#16. Why was is that the Light acted through lies, and the Darkness acted though the truth? Why was is that our truth proved powerless, but lies were effective? And why was the Darkness able to manage perfectly well with truth in order to do Evil?
Sergei Lukyanenko
#17. Life is easier in black and white. It's the ambiguity of a world defined in grays that has stripped me of my confidence and left me powerless.
Amy Plum
#18. When the rich and the powerful rise they leave the powerless and the poor without possibility.
Auliq Ice
#19. You are as ordinary as spring,' he murmured. 'As powerless as sunlight.' He ran his fingertips down her neck. 'And when I touch you, I burn,' he said, making her heart stop and a flare of wild panic light inside her. He was too close; he was getting to her.
Charlotte Lamb
#20. When all government ... in little as in great things ... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.
Thomas Jefferson
#21. We've lost control of this planet somewhere. There's an echo in that kind of tornado situation, where you're powerless facing those phenomena.
Francis Alys
#23. It takes two to make a quarrel. If I do not want to quarrel with a Mahomedan, the latter will be powerless to foist a quarrel on me; and, similarly, I should be powerless if a Mahomedan refuses his assistance to quarrel with me. An
Mahatma Gandhi
#24. He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?
Philip Roth
#25. There are so many people, so many artists, so many magazines, so many theater companies, so many people trying to raise money for so many things that it's easy to look around and just feel powerless or helpless, because even if you have some resources, you can't help everybody.
Amanda Palmer
#26. 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.
Meda Chesney-Lind
#27. He felt oddly powerless, as if his entire life were in the fingers of two faceless players maneuvering pieces in the same patterns on some vast board in a game that, for all he knew, had lasted for eternity.
David Eddings
#29. Don't apologize."
"I wasn't-"
"Not in words, but it was clear from your tone. Apology suggests that you are keeping me from doing what I need to do, which implies I am somehow powerless to do otherwise. It's a choice, Olivia.
Kelley Armstrong
#30. The office of the president is the most powerful in the world. It is also, at times, the most powerless.
Mark McKinnon
#31. If you don't understand the WORD, you can't speak the WORD; instead, you will speak some words that are powerless against the enemy.
Tiffany Buckner-Kameni
#32. Even if only 2 percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.
Albert Einstein
#33. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.
Noam Chomsky
#35. They have rejected that power and sought to convince women of the exact opposite, that they are powerless.
Frederick Lenz
#36. It is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.
Jane Jacobs
#37. There was nothing we could do; we were just a couple of powerless, poor kids, so desperate to find a way to be together.
Renee Carlino
#38. In fact the Gods were as puzzled by all this as the wizards were, but they were powerless to do anything and in any case were engaged in an eons-old battle with the Ice Giants, who had refused to return the lawnmower.
Terry Pratchett
#39. Conscience is a just but weak judge. Weakness leaves it powerless to execute its judgment.
Khalil Gibran
#40. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here's the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.
Derrick Jensen
#41. Impotent fury rages powerless and to no purpose.
Virgil
#42. I'm whining. It's unattractive, but I find I'm powerless to stop
Libba Bray
#43. History judged causes' greatness proportionally by how many individuals ,themselves powerless to affect any outcomes of consequence, suffered and died in their service.
Victor Milan
#44. I have long been aggravated, and it increases, about the way that society values women almost exclusively for their beauty and youth, and when we get older, tries to make us powerless - just when we're at our most knowledgeable, and most capable. It's so rotten. I gnash my teeth.
Maria Dahvana Headley
#45. Once you have courage to look upon evil, seeing it for what it is and naming it by its true name, it is powerless against you, and you can destroy it.
Lloyd Alexander
#46. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Pope Francis
#47. Death," he had said on another occasion, "seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome.
Vladimir Nabokov
#48. The scientific method gives us information by testing and repeating observable things so that we can find the rules for the way that the universe generally works. But if you were to try and use it to prove that Henry VIII had six wives, you would be powerless.
Lewis N. Roe
#49. His pain hurt me in a way I'd never felt before. It was worse than my own pain. My strength wavered. I felt completely powerless.
Kristen Simmons
#50. Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#51. I've played the powerless in too many dark scenes. I was blessed with a birth and a death and I guess I just want some say in between
Ani DiFranco
#52. There's a weighing kind of overemphasis on sexuality, which disempowers music generally, because it silences all the other voices; it makes music a very powerless force for changing the world.
Sinead O'Connor
#53. The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labor. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining-it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process.
Paul Clark
#54. Fear dismembers and disfigures our perspective of God, making Him seem a powerless pawn controlled by our circumstances. But when we re-member the Lord and re-count His works, we begin to re-form our vision of His greatness in our hearts.
Kris Vallotton
#55. Dan thought of another AA aphorism: We're powerless over people, places, and things. Like most alkie nuggets, it was seventy percent true and thirty percent rah-rah bullshit.
Stephen King
#56. For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.
Dante Alighieri
#57. Unfaithful in prayer, weak in the working of the Spirit, its witness to Christ a mere formality, and unfaithful to its worldwide mission - such are the marks of a powerless church.
Andrew Murray
#58. Maybe nobody knows how. Sometimes it's easier to pretend nothing is wrong than to face the fact that everything is wrong, but you're powerless to do anything about it.
Katja Millay
#59. I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
J. Edgar Hoover
#60. Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
Thomas Huxley
#61. Blood rushed to the regions of my body that I associated with naughtiness, and I was powerless to stop it.
Kat Lowe
#63. Powerless But for the star destroyer Unknowing She crash-lands in his heart.
Elizabeth Fama
#64. Love made us stupid. Love made us blind. Love could incapacitate us and leave us powerless.
A Meredith Walters
#65. She was born poor and powerless in a land where power is money and money is adored.
Born black in a land where might is white and white is adored.
Born female in a land where decisions are masculine and masculinity controls.
Maya Angelou
#66. Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.
Issa Rae
#67. To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.
Henri Nouwen
#68. Prayer and action ... can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation.
Henri Nouwen
#69. She had climbed into his turmoil and made herself at home, fixing him one brick at a time from the inside, powerless to stop her, she touched his pain and made it a little better each time.
V. Theia
#70. Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?
Matthew Arnold
#71. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#72. Prayer less pulpits will produce prayer less and powerless congregations.
Wesley L. Duewel
#73. In Community of Caring, we believe the quality of caring we give to our parents, to our brothers and sisters, to our families, to our friends and neighbors, and to the poor and the powerless endows a life, a community with respect, hope and happiness.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
#74. Fischer was a master of clarity and a king of artful positioning. His opponents would see where he was going but were powerless to stop him
Bruce Pandolfini
#75. This new thing between them it was ... Astral. It reshaped the air, and it was in her, too - a warming and softening, a pull - and for that moment, her hands in his, Karou felt as powerless as starlight tugged toward the sun in the huge, strange warp of space.
Laini Taylor
#76. You see pictures of Buddha and he's sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.
Dave Eggers
#77. Here are some key words to go along with shame: Inferior Alienated Embarrassed Minority Ridiculed Weak Powerless Failure Different Insulted Rejected Inadequate Humiliated Ignored Loser
Edward T. Welch
#78. For the core of religion is the twinned principle of arrogance and fear. Fear of oblivion. Fear of an unfair life and an arbitrary universe. Fear of there simply being nothing, no great and grand scheme to existence. The fear, ultimately, of being powerless.
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
#79. Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.
Chuck Palahniuk
#80. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you.
Joseph Sobran
#82. It made me realize how unimaginative I had always been about battered wives. Disaster creeps up, a tidal wave on the tourist beach. By the time you can see it, you are powerless or unable to resist it and it rolls you up and away.
Nicci French
#83. We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone.
Richard Rohr
#84. To rescue people from the natural consequences of their behavior is to render them powerless.
Henry Cloud
#85. She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.
Thomas Hardy
#86. Don't let the politicians chip away at the New Deal and the Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare, that puts a floor beyond which the elderly, the sick, the powerless do not starve or lack for medicine or shelter.
Helen Thomas
#87. 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.
Adrienne Rich
#88. We must be as satisfied to be powerless, idle and still before God, and dried up and barren when He permits it, as to be full of life, enjoying His presence with ease and devotion. The whole matter of our union with God consists in being content either way.
Jane Frances De Chantal
#89. Now I understand the depth of the sadness." William turned and looked at her. "In the painting? Adele's eyes look as though they go deeper than the back of the canvas. It's because of what she saw, because of all the people who walked by her and she was powerless to stop it.
Kristy Cambron
#90. Stewardship means to consciously take up our cultural power, investing it intentionally among the seemingly powerless, putting our power at their disposal to enable them to cultivate and create.
Andy Crouch
#91. If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.
Robert Caro
#92. Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea,they become powerless when they oppose it.
Sigmund Freud
#93. Sure you're powerless, sure you're just one person, sure you can't change anything ... but you don't have to be miserable about it as well.
Lydia Lunch
#94. Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
E.B. White
#95. Letting go of the belief that we're powerless to help relieve our own suffering enhances our ability not only to heal but also to genuinely love and receive the love of others.
Sharon Salzberg
#96. The most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#97. But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere."
"'They?' Who are 'they?'"
"I don't know. Just people."
"That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?
John Connolly
#98. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
Henry David Thoreau
#99. We can bring to earth a new world from the ashes of the old because our union transforms us the powerless into the powerful. And I ask you to join together in using all that power-all that strength to make the dreams of all workers and communities around the world come true.
Andy Stern
#100. Once the 'portals of the future close - in Amazonia, Siberia or the Arctic - we will find ourselves powerless to affect the outcome of this dreadful tale.
Mark Lynas
