Top 47 Quotes About Power And Powerlessness
#1. It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.
Margaret Stohl
#2. Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn't dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#3. You have the power to heal your life, and you need to know that. We think so often that we are helpless, but we're not. We always have the power of our minds ... Claim and consciously use your power.
Louise L. Hay
#4. You know, 'power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely?' It's the same with powerlessness.
Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Einstein
said everything had changed since the atom was split,
except the way we think. We have to think anew.
Studs Terkel
#5. I am so tired - so tired of being of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#6. Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.
Richard M. Weaver
#7. The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic ... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
Russell Baker
#8. A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
#9. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Theodor Adorno
#10. Powerlessness implies inactivity, like an appliance that is not plugged into its electrical current. Empowerment is about plugging into responsible choices and then acting upon them to your fullest capacity.
David Kipper
#11. When you have no real power, go public
really public. The public is where the real power is.
Elizabeth Warren
#12. 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
#13. I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.
Matthew Specktor
#14. Who doesn't love 'Frogger?' It draws its power from our shared memories of powerlessness. Wherever we are now, at one time or another we have all felt the poor frog's anxiety in the face of the world's intransigence, its blind and callous disregard for our happiness or well-being.
D. B. Weiss
#15. If absolute power corrupts absolutely,
does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
Harry Shearer
#16. We have come here together so that you might know, through virtue of your own pain, your own hopelessness, your own fear, your own darkness and the lie of powerlessness, the very actual power of your own will, of the will of your soul.
Jennifer DeLucy
#17. There is a feeling of personal dignity and independence in grasping, literally, the power to back your refusal to be a target of a violent crime with lethal force. This is not a sense of power, it is now the experience of escaping from a sense of powerlessness.
John Longenecker
#18. But what use was the semblance of power without the substance?
Alison Weir
#19. Power is the gem of necessity. Without observing power, identity remains undiscovered.
Lionel Suggs
#20. 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.
Erich Fromm
#21. Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed.
Catharine MacKinnon
#22. God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.
Rob Bell
#23. And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.
Wally Lamb
#24. The innate harmony that exists between mind and body is one of the secrets behind the amazing power of Shin-shin-toitsu-do, which is weakened by an inefficient use of the body. Our bodies must be strong, relaxed, and healthy to respond to our minds' commands.
H.E. Davey
#25. Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Rollo May
#26. Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire
#27. The powerlessness of people with pure intentions, in the long run, can sometimes be more powerful than power in the hands of those blinded or depraved by evil tempers.
Widad Akreyi
#28. Male makeup is men's titles, status and paying for dates. Makeup is what both sexes use to bridge the gap between the power they have and the power they'd like to have. Both male and female makeup are compensations for feelings of powerlessness.
Warren Farrell
#29. Risk is the factor of a stratagem measured by what man is powerless to control.
Mike Norton
#30. Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.
Maggie Kuhn
#31. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.
Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men's Needs.
Arundhati Roy
#32. Let me tell you something, kid," said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.
Catherynne M Valente
#34. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.
Nenia Campbell
#35. God's is real power clothed in apparent powerlessness; Evil's is apparent power which is really powerlessness.
David Jeremiah
#36. Powerlessness does not mean the weakness of resignation or the passivity of an 'anything goes'. Powerlessness does not mean inability ,not having the capacity. Powerlessness means rather leaving power behind , something as disempowering.
Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback
#37. Anything that we do to make ourselves feel worthy and safe is a flight from the pain of powerlessness. Every pursuit of external power - every attempt to change the world or a person in order to make yourself feel valuable and safe - is a distraction from the pain of powerlessness.
Gary Zukav
#38. The crisis of the church is not at its deepest level a crisis of authority, or a crisis of dogmatic theology. It is a crisis of powerlessness in which our sole recourse is to call on the help and inward power of the Holy Spirit.
James K. Baxter
#39. Stories move in from the shadows to the limelight. And though the stage presents the drama of our powerlessness, the shadows offer the secret of our power.
Rebecca Solnit
#40. Any man who has ever tried to use political power for the common good has felt an awful sense of powerlessness.
Robert Casey
#41. It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival.
Judith Lewis Herman
#42. We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.
Warren Farrell
#43. Savor powerlessness, after power, in every phase that matches it precisely; replace every old triumph with the new defeat; strengthen yourself on your weakness; win yourself back when so very lost.
Elias Canetti
#44. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear
civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Arundhati Roy
#45. Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.
Arundhati Roy
#46. I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness.' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.
Fred Rogers
#47. A consciousness of our powerlessness should cast us upon Him who has all power. Here then is where a vision and view of God's sovereignty helps, for it reveals His sufficiency and shows us our insufficiency.
Arthur W. Pink
