Top 100 Quotes About Powerlessness
#1. The windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.
William Gibson
#2. The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy.
Angela Carter
#3. 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.
Gary Zukav
#5. Powerlessness is dangerous. For most of us, the inability to affect change is a desperate feeling. We need resilience and hope and a spirit that can carry us through the doubt and fear. We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts.
Brene Brown
#7. There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.
Blaise Pascal
#8. . . . there are two outlets for the frustration of that powerlessness: insanity and violence.
Laura Bates
#9. Collectively, we must do more than simply watch, with resignation and a feeling of powerlessness, reports on the evening news about the latest terrorist atrocity.
Michael Jeffery
#10. Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The most common reason we stumble into the delusion of powerlessness is that we're afraid of what other people would do or say or feel if we were to act as we wanted.
Martha Beck
#14. God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am. Because of this I don't need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him. I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness.
Brennan Manning
#15. Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness ...
Audre Lorde
#16. We may overcompensate for our feelings of powerlessness by attempting to control and manipulate other people and our environment. Or we may eventually burst forth with uncontrolled rage that is highly exaggerated and distorted by its long suppression.
Shakti Gawain
#17. Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
Peter Singer
#18. I could not stop something I knew was wrong and terrible. I had an awful sense of powerlessness.
Andrei Sakharov
#19. friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. HENRI NOUWEN
Laura Petherbridge
#20. May your expectations all be frustrated, May all of your plans be thwarted, May all of your desires be withered into nothingness, That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and can sing and dance in the love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
John Ortberg
#21. Complaining is never powerful because at the root of a complaint is powerlessness
Dennis Prager
#22. Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.
Maggie Kuhn
#23. 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
#24. Jews must learn to say without excuse, without equivocation: despite our history and our powerlessness in the past, despite allthe injustices that we have endured
today, now, the Palestinians are the victims of oppression, and their oppressors are the Israelis.
Irena Klepfisz
#25. If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Robert Reich
#26. The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
Frances Moore Lappe
#27. We call upon people everywhere to work for peace, to forget the quiet comfort of their homes, to leave behind their fears and feeling of powerlessness, their privileges and possessions, and join us as active participants and co-workers for peace.
Petra Kelly
#28. Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness.
Warren Farrell
#30. May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is the Father, Son and Spirit.
Brennan Manning
#31. For it was only with her that he'd ever felt that powerful powerlessness he knew was love.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#32. Poverty is not only about income poverty, it is about the deprivation of economic and social rights, insecurity, discrimination, exclusion and powerlessness. That is why human rights must not be ignored but given even greater prominence in times of economic crisis.
Irene Khan
#33. You can't go anywhere if you just resign yourself to being attacked. A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person.
Haruki Murakami
#34. God's is real power clothed in apparent powerlessness; Evil's is apparent power which is really powerlessness.
David Jeremiah
#35. We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.
Joan D. Chittister
#36. Larry Hein, who wrote the blessing: May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit
Brennan Manning
#38. It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#39. The majority of us cannot see beyond a few years, just as some animals cannot see beyond a few steps. Just a little narrow circle - that is our world. We have not the patience to look beyond, and thus become immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.
Swami Vivekananda
#40. The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.
Jane Smiley
#41. 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
#42. It's that sense of powerlessness that destroyed my soul. i cannot be as good as i would like to be.nor as bad as i think i need to be.i think you have the same doubts that your goodness was not rewarded
Paulo Coelho
#43. Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook ... But we don't need everyone on board; we don't need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.
Rebecca Solnit
#44. NEED seemed like a really powerful word - - a powerful word containing a lot of powerlessness.
Katie Alender
#45. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.
David Whyte
#46. The terrible powerlessness of being unable to do anything except wait for mercy you couldn't earn and didn't deserve.
Alexis Hall
#47. Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about, to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin.
Haruki Murakami
#48. Luck is a light bulb that is switched on only once, after it switches off, it leaves a gap of regret and powerlessness
Jasper Rules
#49. One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism.
Rollo May
#50. Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Rollo May
#51. Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#52. Victimization is about powerlessness, and justice is about amplifying the voices of those who have been silenced. Healing
Shane Claiborne
#53. The Court long ago acknowledged that effective use of consent searches by the police depends on the ignorance (and powerlessness) of those who are targeted. In
Michelle Alexander
#54. I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee. I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth. There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.
Baha'u'llah
#55. Through cruelty force confesses its powerlessness to achieve omnipotence . . . We see weakness dawning at the very height of force. Unable to admit that total destruction is impossible, the conqueror can only reply to the mute defiance of his defenseless adversary with an ever-growing violence.
Rachel Bespaloff
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Any man who has ever tried to use political power for the common good has felt an awful sense of powerlessness.
Robert Casey
#59. Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
Colson Whitehead
#60. 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
#61. We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.
Warren Farrell
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 237. - No one should be praised for his goodness if he has not strength enough to be wicked. All other goodness is but too often an idleness or powerlessness of will.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#65. 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
#66. minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.
Shashi Tharoor
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Poverty is not just a material problem. Poverty is something wider: it is about powerlessness, about being deprived of basic opportunities and freedom of choice.
Johan Norberg
#70. Trust me with your pain, Lizzie, please. trust me with your anger, confusion, resentment, fear, and all those feelings of powerlessness. Give it all to me. I will carry it, you, and us to the other side
S.E. Hall
#71. Employee participation programs and employee ownership are important efforts to deal with powerlessness at work.
Daniel Yankelovich
#72. All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Erica Jong
#73. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages.
William Hurrell Mallock
#74. Biblical spirituality means powerlessness, living without embellishment or pretense, free to be faithful in the gospel, and free from anxiety about effectiveness or similar illusions of success.
William Stringfellow
#75. If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have no control over outside circumstances, those thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Rhonda Byrne
#76. It is our determination to overcome fear and discouragement that constitutes the only effective antidote to the sense of powerlessness over unwanted feelings.
Gordon Livingston
#77. As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
Michael Chabon
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.
Gary Greenberg
#81. I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness.
Thom Yorke
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. It is when we come to the Lord in our nothingness, our powerlessness and our helplessness that He then enables us to love in a way which, without Him, would be absolutely impossible.
Elisabeth Elliot
#86. 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
#87. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.
Junot Diaz
#88. Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.
Susie Orbach
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.
Gary Zukav
#92. The deeper and more debilitating form of powerlessness is to be cut off from making meaning.
Andy Crouch
#93. Simply being with someone is difficult because it asks of us that we share in the other's vulnerability, enter with him or her into the experience of weakness and powerlessness, become part of the uncertainty, and give up control and self-determination.
Henri Nouwen
#94. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Theodor Adorno
#95. In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Theodor Adorno
#96. 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
#97. For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#98. 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
#99. it's an attitude that mostly comes from immaturity, low self-esteem, and feelings of social powerlessness, and adolescence is a petri dish for those kinds of breeding conditions. I
Elliott James
#100. You saw me vacillating between error and truth, loving them equally because unable to distinguish the one from the other; the hour marked out by God for my enlightenment has come: He has shown me the powerlessness of reason, and the necessity of faith.
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
