Helpless Quotes (14 quotes)
“Heaven helps those who help themselves” is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.
In Self-help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859, 1861), 15.
A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.
Letter to the School Children of the United States, Arbor Day (15 Apr 1907), in Presidential Addresses and State Papers (1910), Vol. 6, 1208.
All our knowledge has been built communally; there would be no astrophysics, there would be no history, there would not even be language, if man were a solitary animal. What follows? It follows that we must be able to rely on other people; we must be able to trust their word. That is, it follows that there is a principle, which binds society together because without it the individual would be helpless to tell the truth from the false. This principle is truthfulness.
In Lecture at M.I.T. (19 Mar 1953), collected in 'The Sense of Human Dignity', Science and Human Values (1956, 1990), 57.
Don't be impatient with me. Bear in mind that I hop around among all of you big beasts like a harmless and helpless frog who is afraid of being squashed.
Letter to Albert Einstein, 16 Aug 1920. In Martin J. Klein, Paul Ehrenfest: The Making of a Theoretical Physicist (1970), Vol. 1, 319.
Human beings can easily destroy every elephant on earth, but we are helpless against the mosquito.
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 80.
I never quite lost the feeling that lecturing is a kind of sacrificial slaughter of helpless victims.
In Hans Cloos, Ernst Cloos (ed.) and Curt Dietz (ed.), Conversation With the Earth (1953, 1959), 250, as translated by E.B. Garside from the original German edition, Gespräch mit der Erde (1947).
Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman’s well-cut suit—it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.
In 'A Challenge to “Knights in Rusty Armor”', The New York Times (14 Feb 1943), Sunday Magazine, 5.
Is it not evident, that if the child is at any epoch of his long period of helplessness inured into any habit or fixed form of activity belonging to a lower stage of development, the tendency will be to arrest growth at that standpoint and make it difficult or next to impossible to continue the growth of the child?
In 'The Old Psychology vs. the New', Journal of Pedagogy (1894), 8, 76.
It is plainly the popularization of science that is responsible for the fever and instability apparent on all sides. To withhold knowledge from people, or to place unassimilable knowledge in their hands, are both equally effective, if you wish to render them helpless.
In The Art of Being Ruled (1926), 423.
Our truest systems of science had small beginnings, gradual and countless contributions, and finally took their place in use, as each of you, from helpless childhood and feeble boyhood, have grown to your present strength and maturity. No such system could be born in a day. It was not as when nature in fitful pulsations of her strength suddenly lifted the land into mountain ranges, but rather, as with small accretions, gathered in during countless years, she builds her islands in the seas.
From Address (1 Aug 1875), 'The Growth of Principles' at Saratoga. Collected in William L. Snyder (ed.), Great Speeches by Great Lawyers: A Collection of Arguments and Speeches (1901), 246.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.
In The Descent of Man (1874), Part 1, Chap 5, 136.
The contest [between the wave and particle theories of light] is something like one between a shark and a tiger, each is supreme in its own element but helpless in that of the other.
In Fison Memorial Lecture (7 May 1925) at Guy’s Hospital Medical School, London, published as The Structure of Light: The Fison Memorial Lecture 1925 (1925), 15.
The Nubians never remember the native name for a river; thus their statements are of little value to geographical criticism. Hence they never speak of the River Bah or Ibba, for example, but always say the “Penio’s river,” because this is the name of the district head whose seat is on this river. In other places they are quite helpless…. This is a dreadful fact. Were the well-traveled and well-informed Arab leaders able to remember the names of the rivers, it would be wonderfully easy to draw a map of the entire country.
In August Petermann, Petermann’s Geographische Mittheilungen (1871), 137. As quoted and cited in Kathrin Fritsch, '"You Have Everything Confused And Mixed Up…!" Georg Schweinfurth, Knowledge And Cartography Of Africa In The 19th Century', History in Africa (2009), 36, 92.
The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
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In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
