Disempowered Quotes

Testimony always comes from people who are in some way disempowered. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

As male characters level up and become more powerful, their bodies become better protected and covered. In contrast, as female characters level up and become more powerful, their bodies are uncovered and made more vulnerable. Thus, as women gain power, they are disempowered in another way. ~ Nick Yee

I think as feminists we have a way of looking at problems that other people appear not to understand. To name names, the right and the
left appear not to understand what it is that feminists are trying to do. Feminists are trying to destroy a sex hierarchy, a race hierarchy, an
economic hierarchy, in which women are hurt, are disempowered, and in which society celebrates cruelty over us and refuses us the integrity of our own bodies and the dignity of our own lives.

... So feminists look at the society we live in and try to understand how we are going to fight male power. And in order to try to figure out
how we're going to fight it, we have to figure out how it's organized, how it works. How does it survive? How does it work itself out? How
does it maintain itself as a system of power?

... So feminists come along, and we say: Well, we are going to understand how it is that these people do what they do. We are going to
approach the problem politically. That means that we are going to try to isolate and describe systems of exploitation as they work on us, from our point of view as the people who are being hurt by them. It means that even though we're on the bottom and they're on the top, we are examining them for points of vulnerability. And as we find those points of vulnerability - and you might locate them anatomically, as well as any other way - we are going to move whatever muscles we have, from whatever positions we are in, ~ Andrea Dworkin

Today, you have the opportunity to transcend from a disempowered mindset of existence to an empowered reality of purpose-driven living. Today is a new day that has been handed to you for shaping. You have the tools, now get out there and create a masterpiece. ~ Steve Maraboli

I don't like wizard stories all that much. Stories about witches are better, because witches are morally ambiguous and traditionally disempowered. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Fundamentalists from every religion have to be replaced, have to be disempowered. ~ James Redfield

The Spirituality and Self-Help industry wants you to be empowered enough to buy their products, but disempowered enough to still think you need them. ~ Steve Maraboli

There's an alternate view. That no man or woman alive is the disempowered victim of another's degrading circumstance. Each is equipped to pursue their own fate. No one needs saving. ~ Janny Wurts

When you have a command over your thoughts and how they are creating, you are the center of your creation. When you put your responsibility outside of yourself and subject yourself as a victim of the universe, you are disempowered and are going to struggle. Live life free and responsibly. Then you will align with your soul's love. It is a matter of acknowledging your power and truly living it. ~ Jason Nelson

[W]omen were those most likely to be victimized because they were the most 'disempowered' by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion and who consituted the bulk of the accused. In other words, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social poer, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better-off at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized begging and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world. ~ Silvia Federici

Cynicism is something that is part of the media production of a certain type of subjectivity or consciousness that is passive and disempowered, cynical, fatalistic, pessimistic. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

When you break up the individuals from a community into individual units, they become disempowered because it's the collective consciousness and the collective energy of the group from which power comes. The principal driving force that lies before us is that we have to recognize the nature of community as the evolutionary step that we just took a step backwards from in the last century. ~ Bruce H. Lipton

Any so-called 'radical' strategy that seeks to empower the disempowered in the realm of social reproduction by opening up that realm to monetisation and market forces is headed in exactly the wrong direction. Providing financial literacy classes for the populace at large will simply expose that population predatory practices as they seek to manage their own investment portfolios like minnows swimming in a sea of sharks. Providing microcredit and microfinance facilities encourages people to participate in the market economy but does so in such a way as to maximise the energy they have to expend while minimising their returns. Providing legal title for land property ownership in the hope that this will bring economic and social stability to the lives of the marginalised will almost certainly lead in the long run to their dispossession and eviction from that space and place they already hold through customary use rights. ~ David Harvey

Blame is the creed of the disempowered. ~ Steve Maraboli

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom. ~ Gloria Steinem

The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations that have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them ~ Chris Hedges

Sometime people are disempowered because they subconsciously identify themselves by their temporary circumstances instead of connecting with their innate value and truth. ~ Steve Maraboli

The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet's work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way - certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? ~ Adrienne Rich

Disempowered and backward in social and economic ~ Anonymous

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand--"the power of love"--is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person.

Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some way and diminished in others, this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her a feeling that a mighty power resides within her being.

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness ~ Sandra Lee Bartky

I'm a black woman every day, and I'm not confused about that. I'm not worried about that. I don't need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don't feel disempowered as a black woman. ~ Shonda Rhimes

A sense of worth is critical to counteracting the scarcity model of love and life. If we do not believe in our worth, we become disempowered, unable to advocate for our needs. We do not see or embrace the love that is actually around us in our lives. ~ Franklin Veaux

The disempowered mind believes dreams come true; the empowered mind knows you bring your dreams to life. ~ Steve Maraboli

If you can transcend from the dark rut of disempowered thinking to the bright light of an empowered agreement with reality, you will see opportunities not barriers. You will see the finish line, not the hurdles. ~ Steve Maraboli

I used to wonder: Is Huxley right or is Orwell right? It turns out they're both right. First you get the new world state and endless diversions as you are disempowered. And then, as we are watching, credit dries up, and the cheap manufactured goods of the consumer society are no longer cheap. Then you get the iron fist of Oceania, of Orwell's 1984. ~ Chris Hedges

Girls and women are most victimised in societies where boys and men are disempowered. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz