I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Obama often criticizes policies that place the interests of the powerful ahead of the powerless. But through his administration's support of abortion rights, Obama shows his lack of empathy for society's most powerless.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Only the powerless live in a money culture and know nothing about money.
Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless.
Prayer less pulpits will produce prayer less and powerless congregations.
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
We live charmed lives if we are living in the center of God's will. All the attacks that Satan can hurl against us are not only powerless to harm us, but are turned into blessing on the way.
We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.
Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.
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.
Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.
However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.
If you think you are powerless, then you are
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
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.
To be a minister means above all to become powerless, or in more precise terms, to speak with our powerlessness to the condition of powerlessness which is so keenly felt but so seldom expressed by the people of our age.
Risk is trying to control something you are powerless over.
The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness is an opportunity for a lost and selfish heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls
