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.
Abhijit Banerjee
I think in the case of horror, it's a chance to confront a lot of your worse fears and those fears usually have to do, ironically, with powerlessness and isolation.
Adam Arkin
In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.
Adam Davidson
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.
Addison Timlin
My earnestness at the injustices I witnessed when I was writing 'Random Family' may have been my gravest reportorial offense during the early years of reporting. When I discuss the book with students, they often ask me how I could 'stand by' in the face of so much suffering; the egregiousness wasn't my powerlessness but my surprise.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
'Storm Warnings' is a poem about powerlessness - about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All 'we' can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change till penetrate keyholes and 'unsealed apertures.'
Adrienne Rich
Excessive fear is always powerless.
Aeschylus
Since I was a kid, I've always been skinny and frail framed. I felt powerless as a child, but I always saw so much power in femininity and female sexuality.
Alaska
Ultraconservatism is, to me, so illogical. Everywhere you go, conservatives want to cut, cut, cut, cut - cut money for powerless people. So, that's the biggest problem I have with them.
Alec Baldwin
'The Darkest Minds' came from a period in my life where I felt my most powerless, when I was a teenager.
Alexandra Bracken
People are fascinated with eternal life and physical power - the idea of having no vulnerability. We all feel small and powerless in the world at times, so the temptation to be a vampire is compelling.
Alexandra Cassavetes
In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.
Alice Roberts
Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.
Amanda Lindhout
When we're sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless.
Amy Cuddy
Too many of us suffer from pervasive feelings of personal powerlessness. We have a terrible habit of obstructing our own paths forward, especially at the worst possible moments.
If you're struggling, it's easy to feel powerless until you take control of it and assert what you want. I can understand that feeling. I can understand how it feels to be alone, to not want to get help from people and to not trust people who are actually wanting the best for you. I feel like that's true for a lot of people, actually.
Andrew Haigh
I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.
Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people's hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.
Angelina Jolie
Panic implies that there is no rational thought taking place. That we are frozen and incapable of adjusting. Powerless to logic, and subject to seemingly unthinkable behavior.
Anthony Scaramucci
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.
Azim Premji
There's no glory and no respect in making fun of the weak, the powerless.
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.
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.
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.
What we actually learn, from any given set of circumstances, determines whether we become increasingly powerless or more powerful.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Public radio has always been so powerless.
I think a lot of women have felt really powerless.
When I first walked into Uber, it was very difficult because people were unsure about what was going to happen - there was a real sense of powerlessness.
Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
It's frustrating to see part of your body not responding - even more so given the way I am and the way I like to train and always give 100 per cent. You experience sadness, anger, and powerlessness... you really want to do something, but you can't. In the end, however, you have to be honest with yourself and those around you.
We know that Brexit would make our poorest communities poorer still. That it would make the powerless even less able to effect change.
An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it's often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.
Writers can feel pretty powerless in the big corporate world of publishing, but sometimes our greatest power is the ability to say 'no.'
By Congress delegating its authority to the executive and judicial branches, we've removed the American people from the process. They're left as bystanders to the whims of executive overreach, and they're watching the country they know and love slip away. Worse, they think their representatives are powerless to stop it.
The burdens of generations of poverty and powerlessness lie heavy in the fields of America. If we fail, there are those who will see violence as the shortcut to change.
I'm not a political person. When I start to get into it, it just upsets me. I feel so powerless when it comes to politics. So I've just decided to be non-political and very, very pro-soldier.
When the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.
I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
Humans are powerless, and even in our exercise of free will, either the Universe is gonna get down with your plan, or it isn't.
When you have a child who wants to take his own life and you feel powerless, nothing else in life matters.
Who doesn't love 'Frogger?' It draws its power from our shared memories of powerlessness. Wherever we are now, at one time or another we have all felt the poor frog's anxiety in the face of the world's intransigence, its blind and callous disregard for our happiness or well-being.
Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that's because most people there have never seen it get serious.
People feel powerless and useless in the world. But they can buy something. It can give them a sense of value, of power.
The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness... but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.
Twelve-step programs require people to accept their powerlessness and turn their lives over to God or another higher power. Many adolescents question religion, and in general teenagers aren't going to turn their lives over to anyone.
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.
Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.
Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own.
I don't deal with conflict well, so sometimes things will happen that will make me feel sort of powerless. But instead of being able to actually deal with the problem, I just suck it up - that's the way I was raised. Music, then, becomes my one avenue for letting things go, and when I get the chance, I let it rip. It's like therapy in that way.
