Helpless Quotes - Page 5

• Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death. The cross, crucified, and that turned into victory. Mohammad was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

  Karen Armstrong

  Men, Victory, Islam

  "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org.

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• My mother died of lung cancer last year. I felt helpless. As an economist, I thought, What can I do?

  Andrew Lo

  Mother, Cancer, Years

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• I asked God "Why, why, why?" I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust.

  Eugene B. Sledge

  War, Sight, Essence

  Eugene B Sledge (2010). “With the Old Breed: The World War Two Pacific Classic”, p.61, Random House

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• Family life in Western society since the time of the Old Testament has been a struggle to maintain patriarchy, male domination, and double standards in the face of a natural drift towards monogamous bonding. Young men have been called upon to prove their masculinity by their willingness to die in warfare, and young women have been called upon to prove their femininity by their willingness to die for their man. Women have been asked to appear small, dumb, and helpless so men would feel big and strong, brave, and clever. It's been a trick.

  Frank Pittman

  Strong, Clever, Struggle

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• Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters "woman's peculiar sphere," her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.

  Anna Garlin Spencer

  Children, Sacrifice, Motherhood

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• Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Atheism, Doctrine, Asceticism

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• The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow J on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?

  Frank Zappa

  Christian, Children, Doors

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.272, Simon and Schuster

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• I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died.I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.

  Shirley Jackson

  Struggle, Thinking, Feet

  Shirley Jackson (2010). “Novels and Stories: The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Other Stories and Sketches”

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• It'll leave you feeling hollow and helpless, and there is where you'll stay. Ain't it funny child, love sometimes leaves you as dead as yesterday.

  Zakk Wylde

  Children, Sadness, Yesterday

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• Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; toage in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we maynot hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the longcenturies falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow drippingon a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful ofus, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.

  H. Rider Haggard

  Love, Fall, Thinking

  H. Rider Haggard (2013). “Delphi Works of H. Rider Haggard (Illustrated)”, p.6785, Delphi Classics

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• I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light.

  Jacques Lusseyran

  Jealous, Eye, Light

  Jacques Lusseyran (2014). “And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II”, p.15, New World Library

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• Female genital mutilation targets little girls, baby girls - fragile angels who are helpless, who cannot fight back. It's a crime against a child, a crime against humanity. It's abuse. It's absolutely criminal and we have to stop it.

  Waris Dirie

  Girl, Baby, Children

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• Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.

  Carrie Mae Weems

  Beautiful, Art, Powerful

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• Scarlett: You should die of shame to leave me here alone and helpless. Rhett: You helpless? (laughs) Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you.

  Vivien Leigh

  Yankees, Laughing, Heaven

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• What can I do now? What am I to become? How can I live in this world I'm condemned to but can't endure? They couldn't stand it either, so they made a world of their own. Well, they have each other's company, and they are heroes, whereas I'm quite alone, and have none of the qualities essential to heroism - the spirit, the toughness, the dedication. I'm back where I was as a child, solitary, helpless, unwanted, frightened.

  Anna Kavan

  Children, Hero, Dedication

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• Health is the greatest of God's gifts, but we take it for granted; yet it hangs on a thread as fine as a spider's web and the tiniest thing can make it snap, leaving the strongest of us helpless in an instant.

  Jennifer Worth

  Leaving, Spiders, Granted

  Jennifer Worth (2005). “Shadows of the workhouse”, George Weidenfeld & Nicholson

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• I'm tired of being Scarlett O'Hara. In my next life I'm going to come back as Melanie Wilkes, fragile and helpless.

  Linda Fairstein

  Tired, Next, Scarlett O Hara

  Linda Fairstein (1997). “Final Jeopardy”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel so helpless. We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and control others. If we are silent, who will take control? God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him. Silence is intimately related to trust.

  Richard J. Foster

  Silence, Bears, Silent

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• A society remotely worth its salt eventually has to come to grips with the barbarism practiced upon helpless creatures in the name of scientific experimentation, tastier/tenderer meat, or more and larger eggs!

  William Kunstler

  Animal, Names, Eggs

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• Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend, But to procrastinate his liveless end.

  William Shakespeare

  Chaos, Hopeless, Ends

  William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Nicholas Rowe (1744). “The Works of Shakespear”, p.387

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• I find along with many virtues in my countrymen there is a jealousy, a soreness, and readiness to take offence, as if they were the most helpless and impotent of mankind, and yet a violence... and a boistrousness in their resentment, as if they had been puffed up with the highest prosperity and power. they will not only be served, but it must also be in their own way and on their own principles and even in words and language that they liked... which renders it very difficult for a plain unguarded man as I am to have anything to do with them or their affairs.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, History, Way

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• Man learned to resort to the dance when he felt helpless or fragmentary, when he felt dislocated in his universe.

  Mary Hunter Austin

  Men, Dancing, Resorts

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• It is undeniably easier to ignore the hardships of those who are too weak to demand their rights than to respond sensitively to their needs. To care is to accept responsibility, to dare to act in accordance with the dictum that the ruler is the strength of the helpless.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Responsibility, Rights, Needs

  "In Quest of Democracy". Essay by Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991.

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• The Law requires much, but offers no help in the carrying out of its requirements. The Lord Jesus requires just as much, yea even more (Matt. 5:21-48), but what he requires from us he himself carries out in us. The law makes demands and leaves us helpless to fulfill them; Christ makes demands, but he himself fulfills in us the very demands he makes.

  Watchman Nee

  Jesus, Law, Demand

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• By "trampling upon the helpless abroad" with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, "by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home."

  Mark Twain

  Home, Tyrants, Apathy

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