Powerless Quotes - Page 7

• I think that being vulnerable is about feeling helpless, or powerless... it's about allowing myself to be in a place where I could be hurt.

  Sadie Calvano

  Hurt, Thinking, Feelings

  "Finding Play Through Work, with Sadie Calvano, star of CBS's Mom". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. May 1, 2014.

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• The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers.

  Dale Jamieson

  Powerful, Technology, Decision

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse.

  Dale Jamieson

  Class, People, Screw Ups

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometimes people who feel powerless, they come to bother their own kids, or they come to bother children.

  Gaspar Noe

  Children, Kids, People

  Source: www.freepatentsonline.com

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• These powerless people at the bottom are the ones with whom we must begin. They must have the insight and the knowledge to work together and recognise that they are on the right track.

  Dorothy Day

  People, Track, Working Together

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• Separation can make us feel helpless and powerless, like we have no control. To withstand this negative force, we must return to our inner core, and that takes work. That takes time and patience.

  Agapi Stassinopoulos

  Negative, Return, Separation

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.

  Lily King

  Children, People, House

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My dad taught me swears when I was a toddler, and I saw, at a really early age, that if I shocked people, I would get approval, and it made my arms itch with glee. I got addicted to it. It became this source of power in a totally powerless life.

  Roseanne Barr

  Dad, People, Age

  Source: www.elle.com

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• Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Past, Law, Evil

  Jawaharlal Nehru, M. Chalapathi Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, Bal Ram Nanda (1972). “Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: Advisory Board: M. Chalapathi Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, and B. R. Nanda; General Editor: S. Gopal”

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• Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

  Rollo May

  Opposites, People, Our Society

  "Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice". Book by Napoleon Hill, p. 104, 1991.

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• One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.

  Michael Pollan

  Powerful, Issues, People

  "Michael Pollan: Eating Is a Political Act". Interview with Mark Eisen, www.alternet.org. November 7, 2008.

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• Zen wants us to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature. This is because Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Spiritual, Nature, Views

  D.T. Suzuki (2007). “An Introduction to Zen Buddhism”, p.45, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It became obvious that we had completely failed to impose rules on unbridled speculative capitalism. That destroyed financial systems, hollowed out state systems and deeply shook German social stability. Can you recall the debate about "locust" hedge funds - even if it's a terrible term. The speculator capitalists roamed the land, stealing the substance from companies and throwing away the shells. And we were powerless.

  Martin Schulz

  Financial, Debate, Stealing

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The first duty of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.

  Hammurabi

  Powerful, Government, Firsts

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• The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We lack strength to endure the least task, being incapable of suffering pain, powerless to enjoy pleasure, impatient with everything. How many invoke death when, after having tried every sort of change, they find themselves reverting to the same sensations, unable to discover any new experience.

  Seneca the Younger

  Pain, New Experiences, Evil

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• The Ragamuffin rabble are the unsung assembly of saved sinners who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness before God, and who cast themselves on His mercy. Startled by the extravagant love of God, they do not require success, fame, wealth, or power to validate their worth.  Their spirit transcends all distinctions between the powerful and powerless, educated and illiterate, billionaires and bag ladies, high-tech geeks and low-tech nerds, males and females, the circus and the sanctuary.

  Brennan Manning

  Powerful, Sight, Nerd

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• Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

  Marcel Proust

  Moving, Mind, Suffering

  Marcel Proust (2015). “Swann's Way”, p.9, Vintage

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• The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

  Theodor Adorno

  Reality, Order, Betrayed

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.35, Stanford University Press

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• If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

  Theodor Adorno

  Philosophy, Acquiescence, Way

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.22, Univ of California Press

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• Our legal system, including the police, is anti-Dalit and anti-poor. The death penalty laws' wrathful majesty, in blood-shot equality, deals the fatal blow on the poor not the rich, the pariah not the brahmin, the black not the white, the underdog not the top dog, the dissenter not the conformist. . . The law barks at all but bites only the poor, the powerless, the illiterate, the ignorant.

  V. R. Krishna Iyer

  Dog, Blow, Blood

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• By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Wine, Max, Purpose

  Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) (2015). “The Chronicles of Clovis”, p.57, Read Books Ltd

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• Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.

  John Ruskin

  Girl, Night, Giving

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 122, 1895.

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• 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.

  Peg O'Connor

  Empowering, Doe, World

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I can't overrule gravity or turn away an approaching hurricane. I'm powerless over those things, yet this doesn't mean that I can't act with responsibility. I can pack provisions and head to my cellar as a storm approaches.

  Peg O'Connor

  Mean, Responsibility, Storm

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• My scars are numerous, my flesh is powerless, my enemy is dangerous, but my God is glorious and His grace is totally sufficient.

  Matt Papa

  Grace, Enemy, Flesh

  Matt Papa (2014). “Look and Live: Behold the Soul-Thrilling, Sin-Destroying Glory of Christ”, p.15, Baker Books

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