Top 130 Powerlessness Quotes & Sayings

Any man who has ever tried to use political power for the common good has felt an awful sense of powerlessness.

The powerlessness of the child is often forgotten. And after it comes the terrifying phase of moving into adulthood.

Powerlessness and silence go together.

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.

If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness…but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.

Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity.

As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.

The burdens of generations of poverty and powerlessness lie heavy in the fields of America. If we fail, there are those who will see violence as the shortcut to change.

An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it's often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.

Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

When I first walked into Uber, it was very difficult because people were unsure about what was going to happen - there was a real sense of powerlessness.

The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness... but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

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.

Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love. Here we see what compassion means. It is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward pull. On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there.

Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness.

Our love for children is so immediate in part because we feel their powerlessness immediately; conversely, part of the way we deny our love for men is by denying men's powerlessness. Too often we have confused love for men with respect for them, especially for their power to take care of us - which is really just love for ourselves.

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.

Every time I scratch apathy, I find powerlessness beneath it. Humans care, they just don't know what to do about it.

It is in the interests of both sexes to hear the other sex's experience of powerlessness.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

Slowly I learn the importance of powerlessness. I experience it in my own life and I live with it in my work. The secret is not to be afraid of it—not to run away. The dying know that we are not God… All they ask is that we do not desert them.

At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.

"Ocean" is more about ... powerlessness and hopelessness. When we're very small we can't actually do anything - we have no say in what happens, we have no money or resources, we sometimes have no idea what's going on.

The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.

I could not stop something I knew was wrong and terrible. I had an awful sense of powerlessness.

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.

Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men.

The acknowledgment of powerlessness does empower. We humans are powerless over a whole host of factors and conditions in the world, and mostly we're not bothered by these.

We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.

Too many of us suffer from pervasive feelings of personal powerlessness. We have a terrible habit of obstructing our own paths forward, especially at the worst possible moments.

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.

I think in the case of horror, it's a chance to confront a lot of your worse fears and those fears usually have to do, ironically, with powerlessness and isolation.

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.

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.

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.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

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.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Complaining is never powerful because at the root of a complaint is powerlessness

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.

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.

There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'

I had very strict parents. My two brothers were power and freedom. I was powerlessness and seclusion.

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.

I was always face to face with total futility and powerlessness.

I have made my will; I have been tormented to do it. I have bought repose; I know the powerlessness and inutility of it.

Employee participation programs and employee ownership are important efforts to deal with powerlessness at work.