Powerless Quotes - Page 3

• Life needed a fast forward button. Because there were days you just don't want to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it.

  Sara Zarr

  Buttons, Want, Faces

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• To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand.

  Claude Bernard

  Art, Science, Two

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled ---- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer . . . to look with new eyes on matters great and small.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Peace, Eye, Perspective

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1998). “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Writings”

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• If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies [microbes], it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies.

  Louis Pasteur

  Science, Enemy, Body

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• Alas! is even love too weak
  To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
  Are even lovers powerless to reveal
  To one another what indeed they feel?
  I knew the mass of men conceal'd
  Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
  They would by other men be met
  With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
  I knew they lived and moved
  Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
  Of men, and alien to themselves - and yet
  The same heart beats in every human breast!

  Matthew Arnold

  Life, Heart, Men

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.167, Delphi Classics

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• Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

  Bertrand Russell

  Life, Death, Fall

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, p.115, Simon and Schuster

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• No one must ever let power or social, economic, or political interest turn him or her away from other human beings, from the attention they deserve and the respect they are entitled to. nothing must ever lead to a person to compromise this principle or faith in favor of a political strategy aimed at saving or protecting a community from some peril. The freely offered, sincere heart of a poor, powerless individual is worth a thousand times more in the sight of God than the assiduously courted, self-interested heart of a rich one.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Heart, Sight, Self

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• You ever want to feel powerless? Watch the people you care about being hurt and know there is nothing you can do about it.

  Corey Taylor

  Hurt, People, Watches

  Corey Taylor (2012). “Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good”, p.116, Da Capo Press

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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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• I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Fashion, Clothes, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.48, Harvard University Press

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• If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.

  William Graham Sumner

  Destiny, Political, Over You

  William Graham Sumner (1924). “Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner”

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• They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Feelings, Stones, Fool

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1981). “Don Quixote”, Signet Classics

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• The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

  Russell Brand

  Drinking, Addiction, Alcohol

  "My life without drugs" by Russell Brand, www.theguardian.com. March 9, 2013.

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• I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Real, Responsibility, Thinking

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• Those in powerless positions aren't about to complain about bullying bosses, abusive supervisors or corrupt co-workers. There is no safe way to do so and no process that promises redress.

  Margaret Heffernan

  Bullying, Boss, Promise

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• Nothing is indifferent, nothing is powerless in the universe; an atom might destroy everything, an atom might save everything!

  Gerard De Nerval

  Science, Atoms, Might

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• Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.

  Franz Kafka

  Evil, Deception, Trying

  Franz Kafka (1954). “Wedding preparations in the country: and other posthumous prose writings. With notes by Max Brod”

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• It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing?

  Russell Brand

  Lying, People, Drunk

  "Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery". Book by Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader, www.npr.org. August 23, 2016.

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• Without doubt one is allowed to resist against the unjust aggressor to one's life, one's goods or one's physical integrity; sometimes, even 'til the aggressor's death... In fact, this act is aimed at preserving one's life or one's goods and to make the aggressor powerless. Thus, it is a good act, which is the right of the victim.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Integrity, Gun, Doubt

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• There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Allies, Moral

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.50, Penguin

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• At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.

  Robert Walser

  Suffering, Weakness, Misery

  Robert Walser (2012). “Berlin Stories”, p.119, New York Review of Books

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• In the first place, you shouldn't believe in promises. The world is full of them: the promises of riches, of eternal salvation, of infinite love. Some people think they can promise anything, others accept whatever seems to guarantee better days ahead, as, I suspect is your case. Those who make promises they don't keep end up powerless and frustrated, and exactly the fate awaits those who believe promises.

  Paulo Coelho

  Believe, Fate, Thinking

  Paulo Coelho (2009). “The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation”, p.10, Harper Collins

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• Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Inspirational, Patience, Hurt

  Leonardo (da Vinci) (1957). “Notebooks”

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• Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

  Erich Fromm

  Powerful, Men, Machines

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• I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

  Aldous Huxley

  Two, World, Way

  Aldous Huxley (1970). “Letters of Aldous Huxley”

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