Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.
B. H. Liddell Hart
Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.
I know of nothing more moving, indeed semi-tragic, than the yearning helplessness in the face of a dog, who understands what is said to him, and can not answer!
Bayard Taylor
One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness.
Criss Angel
I really struggle with that feeling of helplessness. That's why I really try to get my blogs, and even myself, to point to the positive and look at all the inspiring things that are happening.
Daryl Hannah
The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).
Dawn Powell
Anguish over the loss of a loved one or feelings of helplessness have complex roots. But in the end, they make you feel bad because they adjust your brain's chemistry. Happiness and its opposite are both electro-chemical reactions; those reactions are temporary and ineffable and could even have hidden benefits.
Eliot Schrefer
I'm an emotional person, but it is not my helplessness.
H. D. Kumaraswamy
Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.
James Buchan
Lazy doesn't exist. Lazy is a symptom of something else. The person who can't get up off their butt is just a person who's depressed. It's usually a pervasive lack of self-worth, or a feeling of helplessness.
Jillian Michaels
Americans' perceptions of Africa remain rooted in troubling stereotypes of helplessness and perpetual crisis.
John Prendergast
We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.
Jonathan Sacks
Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.
Joss Whedon
It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.
Lech Walesa
Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness.
Sometimes when I am photographing a major news event, I am suddenly overwhelmed by helplessness.
Lynsey Addario
Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.
Mahatma Gandhi
O.K., helplessness is repugnant to me, as a father, as a piece of protoplasm. My parents were activists. I don't believe you can't do anything.
Marshall Brickman
We have fear as soon as we are born, we are born into a state of physical helplessness.
Martha Nussbaum
Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.
Fear is ubiquitous in human life. It starts in infancy with our primal state of helplessness, where we can see what's going on but we can't move to get it. As we grow older we become a little more able to get what we want but then we're going to die so that gives fear another boost.
Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.
When I dabble in watching the news and reading about current events, I tend to get a future negative view, and that's something I've dealt with through music. It's quite possible I'm slightly paranoid. But I'd say making music is an expression of feelings of helplessness and lack of control that I think a lot of people can relate to.
There's a learned helplessness for a lot of people who are leaving Westboro because you're not allowed to have any kind of independence when you are there so a lot of people don't have practical life skills.
There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future, but that's what a parent's tears often are, a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope.
I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.
In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.
In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness - of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.
As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.
No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
Aside from doing everything possible to provide programs for people who are seriously ill, I want to do everything humanly possible to help create a more caring society so that we can begin to counter the painful loneliness and sense of helplessness which has engulfed too many of our people.
There's no way to escape the fact that we've grown up in a violent culture, we just can't get away from it, it's part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we've always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.
Whenever there was a crisis, I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain.
I don't think I could play a character that I couldn't relate to somehow. I'm not unfamiliar with frustration, anger, shame, helplessness and a load of other emotions that make up our psycho-soup. I try to focus on that frustration, that sense of unfairness, and multiply it.
Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.
