Powerless Quotes - Page 16

• Economically, legally, and politically powerless throughout much of western history, women have been linked to nature and the unknowable through metaphors of the body while the masculine has signified culture and mental activity.

  Whitney Chadwick

  Art, Culture, Body

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• Ghetto humor is the social twin of fantasy; together they sustain the powerless, who accomplish miracles through illusion.

  Sheila Ballantyne

  Humor, Ghetto, Miracle

  Sheila Ballantyne (1983). “Norma Jean, the termite queen”, Viking Pr

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• Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads in the biggest and most powerful puddle in the world. Their sense of power comes from identifying with the puddle. Canadians as individuals may have more power within the puddle, since there are fewer toads in it; it's the puddle that's seen as powerless.

  Margaret Atwood

  Powerful, United States, Different

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• 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

  Writing, Artist, Thinking

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• The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people be meets on the street for fear they may touch him.

  Phillips Brooks

  Believe, Men, Knowing

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• I too am not powerless, and my weapons strike hard.

  Ovid

  Weapons, Strikes, Hard

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• There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerless, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair.

  Blaise Pascal

  Sadness, Passion, Men

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• I have reared a memorial more enduring than brass, and loftier than the regal structure of the pyramids, which neither the corroding shower nor the powerless north wind can destroy; no, not even unending years nor the flight of time itself. I shall not entirely die. The greater part of me shall escape oblivion.

  Horace

  Years, Wind, Pyramids

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 388-90, Carmina, III. 30. 1, 1922.

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• fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.

  Marya Mannes

  Fear, Superstitions, Bogs

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• 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

  Peace, Ubuntu, People

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.105, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.

  Orson Scott Card

  Suicide, Views, Wish

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “Ender's Game Boxed Set: Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow”, p.545, Macmillan

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• These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat.

  Richard Wagner

  Art, Soul, Logic

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• No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Animal, Men

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• Redd laughed. "The lovely thing about being here," she said, gesturing at the maze, "is that I'm able to immagine your imagination powerless. Ah, if only that were the case on the outside. But enough chitchat. If you're going to die--which you are--I'm sure you'd like to get it over with." --The Looking Glass Wars

  Frank Beddor

  War, Glasses, Imagination

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• 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

  Voice, Silence, World

  "INTERVIEW: Sinéad O’Connor Isn’t Bossy, She’s the Boss". Interview with Sarah Toce, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 28, 2014.

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• Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.

  Henri Nouwen

  Powerful, Anxiety, Despair

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• Ministers are powerless people who have nothing to boast of except their weaknesses. But when the Lord whom they serve fills them with His blessing they will move mountains and change the hearts of people wherever they go.

  Henri Nouwen

  Moving, Heart, Blessing

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• To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

  Lynn Margulis

  Moving, Responsibility, Self

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• You may feel powerless as a child, but the world will one day be yours. And you're responsible for it. So, seize the day and take charge of it.

  Harvey Fierstein

  Children, One Day, Seize The Day

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• People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

  Don DeLillo

  Power, People, Literature

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

  Quentin Crisp

  Character, Power, Hands

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• If you're a queen, you're powerless, so I'd probably demote myself and go shopping.

  Helena Bonham Carter

  Inspirational, Queens, Shopping

  "Munching apples with Helena Bonham Carter". Interview with John Hind, www.theguardian.com. March 17, 2012.

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• Here I found myself in my early 20s, at the height of my career, up against something I was totally powerless against. I had enemies I had never heard of because of this. I certainly didn't have needles hanging out of my arms, nor did I smoke anything.

  Irene Cara

  Careers, Enemy, Arms

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• 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

  Mean, People, Age

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• Money is such an amazing teacher: What you choose to do with your money shows whether you are truly powerful or powerless.

  Suze Orman

  Teacher, Money, Powerful

  Twitter post from May 10, 2016

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