Top 90 Powerless Quotes

My father, John Steinbeck, was a man who held human history in great reverence, and in particular the biographies of those people who had risked their lives, their fortunes, and their worldly honor to defend the rights and prerogatives of those who were powerless to defend themselves.

America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.

Often I feel powerless when I hear stories about animals in shelters across the country whose lives are taken simply because they have no safe place to call home, but raising funds through Strut Your Mutt helps people help these pets.

Writers can feel pretty powerless in the big corporate world of publishing, but sometimes our greatest power is the ability to say ‘no.’

I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it’s vulgar.

I’m a health nut who likes to work out every day, but I am powerless when it comes to Yorkshire pudding, pizza and ice cream.

I’m not saying we have power over everything in our lives – if that were true, my hair would look so, so different – but I am saying that there’s no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.

When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it’s vulgar.

Bullying made me feel insecure, alone, ugly, powerless, and hopeless at times.

I prefer working, period. I think that I like doing film more just because when you get a script, you have the story from start to finish, so you can really find the character’s arc, and when you walk away from it, you know you’re sort of powerless to what happens.

I grew up feeling voiceless and powerless as a kid. I turned to books – fantasy books in particular – to give me comfort. As I grew up, I realized I could find that sense of power and voice if I simply started writing.

The test of our social commitment and humanity is how we treat the most powerless of our fellow citizens, the respect we accord to our fellow human beings. That is what reveals our true culture.

There’s just a feeling, when you’re just an actor – I have great admiration for people who are just actors. I don’t understand it, the idea of waiting to get cast, being at the whim of others. I find it incredibly powerless and frightening, so that’s why I’ve been constantly trying to create my own content.

I suspect most politicians feel overwhelmed because people’s lives are a real struggle, full of unhappiness, and you would probably feel powerless to do anything about it.

In presence of Nature’s grand convulsions, man is powerless.

The circulating medium being issued only by those who labor, they would suddenly become invested with all the wealth and all the power; and those who did not labor, be they ever so rich now, would as suddenly become poor and powerless.

People feel powerless and useless in the world. But they can buy something. It can give them a sense of value, of power.

I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I’ve always been like that; I don’t smile in any pictures.

I didn’t feel as though, when I was a child, I had much control of my environment. I felt powerless. And that gave me a sense of predictability.

In Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing.

Labor is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action – ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.

An administration without a police executive is powerless and there were many proofs of this.

I was in Jersey when the whole World Trade Center thing happened and I felt powerless. So, I went to Hawaii and did a surf movie. It’s kind of fluffy.

I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.

Ministers are powerless people who have nothing to boast of except their weaknesses. But when the Lord whom they serve fills them with His blessing they will move mountains and change the hearts of people wherever they go.

Historically, professors have defended tenure as a way to protect their individualistic thought. But tenure can also be used as a club to wield against the powerless.

Corruption is a huge problem and the poor and the powerless are often its most egregious victims. But it is not an accident that the most effective bureaucracies in the world rely much more on internal controls rather than on independent ombudsmen.

If we were handling a bomb which could go off at any minute as a result of our actions, we would mind ourselves and be delicate. Our words have the same power, yet we wield them around as though they were powerless and insignificant.

Sometimes, it is enough for us to hold out a hand to receive help. It is not we who help; God helps, granting His power to the powerless word.

I couldn’t watch ‘BP’ for a long time, until I started doing this job, because I knew in my heart that ‘Blue Planet,’ as beautiful as it was, at the end they would always have the human impact, and I struggled to watch it because I felt so powerless.

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

No one has it easy, and to some degree, everyone feels lonely and powerless, which may cause them to make hurtful decisions.

The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it’s not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point. Poor people do not shut down factories… Poor people didn’t decide to use ‘contract employees’ because they cost less and don’t get any benefits.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

Individual actions are important because in any democracy, citizens need to feel agency. If you feel powerless, totally powerless, it’s psychologically dangerous.

I have always felt my role was to do anything I could to enable the powerless to speak. I want America to hear these voices because they are beautiful voices.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

What we actually learn, from any given set of circumstances, determines whether we become increasingly powerless or more powerful.

Endless are the instances of men of bright parts and high spirit having been, by degrees, rendered powerless and despicable by their imaginary wants.

‘The Darkest Minds’ came from a period in my life where I felt my most powerless, when I was a teenager.

If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill – the human cost of public works. That’s what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

The point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless.

Being in a first-world country, it’s like we have a first-row seat to witnessing humanity, but we’re not really witnessing anything. Despite all the new technological tools we’ve been given, we’re still powerless, watching everything happen like it’s a theatrical performance.

Before the sacred, people lost all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my – conscience.

We know that Brexit would make our poorest communities poorer still. That it would make the powerless even less able to effect change.

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t feel powerless. I know I can do something. But anyone can do something, it’s not about being special. It’s about deciding to do it – to dive into work for peace and justice and care for everybody on the planet.

Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.

When you label so much of what happens to you as ‘bad,’ it reinforces the feeling that you are a powerless pawn at the mercy of outside forces over which you have no control. And – this is key – labeling something a bad thing almost guarantees that you’ll experience it as such.

I’ve stopped many things such as healthy eating. What’s the point? In this post-truth era, I feel increasingly powerless.

You feel kind of powerless as a kid, so I wanted to create a world where the kid actually gets some power.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

It is in the power of every individual to do that which the community as a whole is powerless to effect.