Impotence Quotes - Page 3

• We live in the shadow of crime with the unspoken understanding that we are victims.. of fear, of violence, of social impotence. A man has risen to show us that the power is, ans always has been, in our hands. We are under siege. He's showing us that we can resist.

  Frank Miller

  Men, Hands, Understanding

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• In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

  Saul Bellow

  Emotional, People, Feelings

  Saul Bellow (2016). “It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future”, p.138, Odyssey Editions

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• There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.

  Maxim Gorky

  Song, Book, Writing

  "Foma Gordeyev". Book by Maxim Gorky, 1899.

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• O impotence of mind, in body strong! But what is strength without a double share Of wisdom, vast, unwieldy, burdensome, Proudly secure, yet liable to fall By weakest subtleties, not made to rule, But to subserve where wisdom bears command.

  John Milton

  Strong, Fall, Mind

  1671 Samson Agonistes, l.52-7.

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• Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.

  Honore de Balzac

  Powerful, Sin, Repentance

  Honore de Balzac (2015). “Seraphita: Works of Balzac”, p.59, 谷月社

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• Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious. But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.

  Paul Valery

  Hero, Men, Criminals

  "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 58), 1931.

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• I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is
  death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.

  Erich Fromm

  Believe, Men, Law

  Erich Fromm (2013). “On Being Human”, p.123, Open Road Media

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• He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire.

  Stefan Zweig

  Love, Passion, Suffering

  "Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

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• To men of a certain type The suspicion that they are incapable of loving Is as disturbing to their self-esteem As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.

  T. S. Eliot

  Love, Self Esteem, Men

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950”, p.364, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Pride, Air, Credentials

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• People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Responsibility, Thinking, People

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• In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.

  Peter L. Berger

  Love, Science, Technique

  Peter L. Berger (1973). “Invitation to sociology: a humanistic perspective”, Overlook Pr

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• Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - burning us.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Christian, Humanity, Burning

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL - Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: The Critique of the Traditional Morality and the Philosophy of the Past”, p.50, e-artnow

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• All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Political, Luck

  "Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba". Esquire, December 1934.

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• One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty.

  H. L. Mencken

  Business, Believe, Law

  "Liberty and Democracy". Baltimore Evening Sun (April 13, 1925) as quoted in "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy: A New Selection from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit" edited by Terry Teachout (p. 35), 1994.

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• Ireland need fresh impotence.

  Phil Babb

  Football, Needs, Ireland

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• The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Exercise, Civilization, People

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• Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Pride, Loss

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• Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Omnipotence, Mixtures, Definitions

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• The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

  Theodor Adorno

  Giving Up, Symbolism, Sound

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.352, Univ of California Press

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• Do not first announce action, and then, when you are unable to take action, withdraw, because you will only find yourself in the same position as now, plus a public and humiliating confession of impotence.

  Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

  Finding Yourself, Politics, Firsts

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• The hood-winked husband shows his anger, and the word jealous is flung in his face. Jealous husband equals betrayed husband. And there are women who look upon jealousy as synonymous with impotence, so that the betrayed husband can only shut his eyes, powerless in the face of such accusations.

  August Strindberg

  Husband, Eye, Jealous

  August Strindberg (1967). “A Madman's Defense”, Peter Smith Pub Incorporated

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• Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Believe, Past, People

  "Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?" by Eric Hobsbawm, www.theguardian.com. April 9, 2009.

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• Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

  Neil Postman

  Giving, Voting, News

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.69, Penguin

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• Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Reflection, Self

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.50, Verso

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