Powerlessness Quotes

“What do you think you know about me!? This is all I am! I have high hopes even though I'm powerless; I have all these dreams even though I'm dumb; I keep trying even though I can't do anything! I hate myself! I'm always nothing but talk! I'm worse than useless, but I'm still a world-class complainer! Who the hell do I think I am?! How dare I live such a shameful life this long?! I'm empty. I've got nothing inside me. Until I came here, until I met all of you, do you know what I was doing?! I wasn't doing anything. I didn't do anything... I didn't do one little thing! With all that time to do it! With all that freedom! I should have done lots of stuff, but I didn't do any of it! And this is the result! The man I am now is the result! I'm powerless, talentless, and all of it, all of it, is because of my rotten personality! I want to achieve something when I haven't done anything before--conceited doesn't even begin to describe it... I was lazy and imposed on other people; I wasted my whole life away; I killed you. I thought I could live here, but not a single thing's changed about me. That old man saw right through me, didn't he? During those days of training, the old man had spoken of those who wield the sword, but he had shaken his head and said, 'There is little point lecturing someone about what it takes to become stronger when he has already abandoned the choice to do so.' It's not like I really thought I'd get stronger or I'd be able to do anything... I just went through the motions. I was just a poser trying to justify myself. I wanted to say, I couldn't help it! I wanted other people to say it couldn't be helped! That's all it was! That's the only reason I pretended to put myself on the line like that! Even when you were helping me study, I was just putting on a show to cover up the embarrassment! I'm a small, underhanded, filthy guy down to the bone, always worrying about what other people think of me, and none of that's ever changed!”
― Tappei Nagatsuki, Re：ゼロから始める異世界生活 6 [Re:Zero Kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu, Vol. 6]

“It's a book that is set over 160 year ago. A lot has changed. A lot hasn't. We are only just beginning to appreciate exactly how a person's powerlessness may lead to struggles with their mental health. With our understanding, statics showing higher rates of mental illness in women, people of color and other disenfranchised groups become translated into truth. NOT a biological deficiency as doctors first thought. But a cultural creation that, if wanted to, we could do something about.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“Oftentimes, the scapegoat feels worthless and powerless. After being beaten down, year after year, we have a strong sense of false guilt. Unconsciously, we take the narcissist’s guilt as if it were our own. As if it were our fault. As if we are deserving of mental torture and physical abuse.”
― Dana Arcuri, Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma

“It must be easy to ponder the universe, safe in your palace, away from the petty, brutal dealings of man. Maybe you don’t remember what it is to be powerless. I do.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“I'd like you to know there is a limit to the disgrace in the consciousness of one's own worthlessness and powerlessness beyond which a man cannot go, and after which he begins to feel a tremendous satisfaction in his own disgrace.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied Europe with a rifle in his hands and the other in the Indian Hill dining lodge in front of a plate of macaroni and cheese? Why does He place one Weequahic child in polio-ridden Newark for the summer and another in the splendid sanctuary of the Poconos? For someone who had previously found in diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems, there was now much that was inexplicable to him about why what happens, happens as it does.”
― Philip Roth, Nemesis

“Glory and Performance.
Seen from America and by American intellectuals (Susan Sontag), the denial of reality in European cultures, and particularly in French theory, is merely 'metaphysical' pique at no longer being master of that reality, and the - at once arrogant and ironic - manifestation of that powerlessness. And this is no doubt true. But the converse is also true: is not the bias towards reality among Americans, their 'affirmative thinking', the naive and ideological expression of the fact that they have, by their power, a monopoly of reality?
We do, admittedly, live with a ridiculous nostalgia for glory (the glory of history and culture), but they live with the ridiculous illusion of performance.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“God scoffs at (smiles at) those he sees denouncing the evils of which they are the cause.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“You’re a divine being. Creator of your own reality experience. Don’t give away your power.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.”
― Theodor Adorno et al

“They're both afraid. They look at their children--Alan has four kids, too--and they're afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness. And they're tired. There are millions of people like them--people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Despite all the positive psychological attributes of hatred we have outlined, hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. It blinds the individual to all values of worth, even as they apply to himself and to his fellows. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“You grow up to believe that if you say, Please pass the salt, a person will reach toward the shaker, grab it in his hand, and move it in your direction. But then one day some of us might learn that it can happen that you can say, Please pass the salt, and a person will jam his hand into the mayonnaise jar and fling a fistful of it at your face. All at once, words don't mean what they're supposed to mean.
I am a girl. My name is Io. I say no thanks, not me, stop please. But all at once, words do not matter. I do not matter.”
― Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

“It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way – so what sort of an idea can he have of this? – Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? – As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator.… And then go on wondering, hour after hour, night after night, what – just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels – how could you! It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall. I can’t go on like this much longer.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“It is not inability itself, but the feeling of powerlessness that breeds fear. That fear then breeds hatred. And hatred, the spawn of fear and powerlessness, leads us to ruin.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, The Tarishe Curse

“I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over women and girls were attacked, not for what they'd done, but because they were at hand when a man wished to. To punish is the word that comes to mind but for what might linger as a question. Not for who, but for what they were, we were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“If there is a devil at work then he rests in institutions and not in individuals. Because the beauty of institutions is that any individual can abdicate responsibility. The assumption that we're all utterly powerless, that's the devil at work.”
― Thom Yorke

“Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny, he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power—a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“If power is a thing to be had, it must be capable of possession. Power is continuous. Say you are given some power, which then increases your capacity to accumulate more power. Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless. If the more power one has, the less one has, then is it the thing or are you?”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox

“Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we're doing something.”
― Gavin de Becker, Gift of Fear, Meditations on Violence and Drills 3 Books Collection Set

“In a Chinese film, a man is responsible for the death of a child, his friend's son. He attempts, first of all, to make amends for the death with money. The father is prepared to accept it, but the mother rejects it. She wants vengeance: the man owes her a life in exchange. He then sees no solution but to die. But the mother denies him that too easy solution, the suicide that would unbind him forever. He must, then, renounce dying. Only on these terms is the mother reconciled to him.

Those politicians who try to slip a bit of power to the 'intellectuals' (missions, commissions, etc.) - on the one hand, to prove to themselves that they have some, but, above all, so as to leave no one outside the field of power. 'If I knew that there still are on this earth some men without any power I would say that nothing is lost' (Canetti).

As Nerval says of hours, so it is with books: it is already the next one, it is still the last one, and it is always the only one.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose their ability to save their children, spouses are separated, homes - places of protection - become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping - having the right to be part of a communal recovery.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Powerlessness is simply a lack of meaningful choice.”
― Elliot Connor, Human Nature: How to be a Better Animal

“Je n'avais pas envie de mots. Il n'y avait pas de mots. Il n'y en avait pas parce que les mots sont le sens et que ce soir il n'y a plus aucun sens.”
― Dima Abdallah, Mauvaises herbes

“There is a certain kind of person who, from many years of being bullied, becomes convinced that bullies run the world, and that if they run the world they must have a right to run the world, and that if they have a right to run the world they must be running it as it is supposed to run.”
― S.E. Grove, The Golden Specific

“A woman can never change a man’s nature, Abigail. Never. Not by any power, not by any measure of love or lust. In the end, I failed and had many a bruise for my trouble.”
― Kathryn Ann Kingsley, The Unseelie Crown

“It is extraordinarily difficult not to hate someone when one feels powerless with them.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard, Casting Off

“When you victimize yourself, you put yourself in the most dangerous position: in another person's hands reacting to their actions. When you determine you're the victim, you lose control of your ability to act on your own.”
― Waitlyn Andrews, Yes, Chef

“And so the balance is maintained: well-fed nations wallow in neurosis and excesses, while people plagued with suffering ... may rely on numbness and apathy to help see them through”
― Marta Hillers, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary

“We are yet to comprehend the unexplainable buried deep into the unreachable abysses of our minds. Something—swerving inside—which deprives you of peace even when you feel content with the life you have, something which casts the stormy dark clouds over your existence, something which devours your tranquility like a black hole does to whatever inches towards it. Incessant struggle with the lurking demons makes you realise your powerlessness, coercing you to make peace with the inconspicuous, the unexplainable, the inseparable embed within you. And it gradually thrives enshrouding the purpose of your existence.”
― Renuka Goria