Helplessness Quotes - Page 7

• Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.

  Arundhati Roy

  Gratitude, Thinking, Giving

  Arundhati Roy (2002). “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”, p.136, Penguin Books India

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• Let the church come to God in the strength of a perfect weakness, in the power of a felt helplessness and a child-like confidence, and then, either she has no strength, and has no right to be, or she has a strength that is infinite. Then and thus, will she stretch out the rod over the seas of difficulty that lie before her, and the waters shall divide, and she shall pass through, and sing the song of deliverance.

  Mark Hopkins

  Song, Children, Lying

  Adam Reid, Benjamin Wood, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Henry Brewster Stanton, Laurens Perseus Hickok (1850). “Strength and beauty: A baccalaureate sermon, delivered at Williamstown, Ms. August 17, 1851”

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• You're people, in short, who must be stupid, insane, or evil to continue arguing in the face of indisputable facts and irrefutable logic that others must be forced into a state of helplessness and victimized by individual criminals or the state. Stupid, insane, or evil.

  L. Neil Smith

  Stupid, People, Evil

  "Murder by Gun Control". The Libertarian Enterprise, www.ncc-1776.org. March 31, 2000.

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• A knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate...is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Fate

  Pearl S. Buck (2013). “My Several Worlds: A Personal Record”, p.69, Open Road Media

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• Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.

  Joss Whedon

  Writing, Empowerment, Ends

  "Joss Whedon: ‘I want to make things that are small, pure and odd.’". Interview with, www.indiewire.com. March 12, 2012.

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• If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we'll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Different, Credit, Actors

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• You have no control [over natural disaster]. That's what's scary about it. You're helpless. That feeling of helplessness is really scary.

  R. L. Stine

  Scary, Feelings, Natural

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

  Norman Cousins

  Spring, Self, People

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• [T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Men, Voting, Principles

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• A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Pride, Men

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• Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Two, People, Childhood

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

  Doris Lessing

  Pain, Cat, Knowing

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Particularly Cats-- and Rufus”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Character, Dangerous Situations, Sheep

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• A person moving in zero gravity feels a pitiful helplessness. One wrong move and you find yourself spinning wildly. Everyone becomes a baby again in outer space, laboriously learning how to walk.

  Ulrich Walter

  Baby, Zero, Moving

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.

  Margery Allingham

  Anger, Doe, Emotion

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

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• Poor dusky children of slavery, men and women of my own race-the transition from slavery to freedom was too sudden for you! The bright dreams were too rudely dispelled; you were not prepared for the new life that opened before you, and the great masses of the North learned to look upon your helplessness with indifference-learned to speak of you as an idle, dependent race. Reason should have prompted kinder thoughts. Charity is ever kind.

  Elizabeth Keckley

  Dream, Children, Men

  Elizabeth Keckley (2016). “Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House”, p.52, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• Unfortunately, there are people in America, there are people in politics, there are people in positions of authority, who want to forcibly unarm, and force in to helplessness, American citizens.

  Ted Nugent

  America, People, Citizens

  Source: gawker.com

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• The preacher's work is to throw sinners down into utter helplessness that they may be compelled to look up to Him Who alone can help them.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Looks, May, Helping

  Charles Spurgeon (2015). “Select Works”, p.121, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Whenever there was a crisis, I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain.

  Susan Cheever

  Pain, Men, Feelings

  Susan Cheever (2009). “Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction”, p.128, Simon and Schuster

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• Borderlines create the vicious circles they fear most. They become angry and drive the relationship to the breaking point, then switch to a posture of helplessness and contrition, beg for reconciliation. If both parties are equally enmeshed, chaos and conflict become the soul of the relationship.

  Theodore Millon

  Party, Circles, Point Break

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• We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.

  Herodotus

  Islands, Two, Useless

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• Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and common sense." Freud for his part criticized Jung for being gullible about occult phenomena and infatuated with Oriental religions; he viewed with sardonic and unmitigated skepticism Jung's defense of religious feelings as an integral element in mental health. For Freud, religion was a psychological need projected onto culture, the child's feeling of helplessness surviving in adults, to be analyzed rather than admired.

  Peter Gay

  Religious, Children, Psychological Needs

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• Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Names, Giving, Memorial

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.221, University of Georgia Press

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• Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Children, Often Is, Self

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• My helpless friend, your helplessness is the most powerful plea which rises up to the tender father-heart of God. You think that everything is closed to you because you cannot pray. My friend, your helplessness is the very essence of prayer.

  Ole Hallesby

  Friends, Powerful, Prayer

  Ole Hallesby (1975). “Prayer”, Augsburg Fortress Publishing

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