Quote by Alice Walker: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

People often feel powerless not because they genuinely lack power but because they've been taught to believe they do. The moment you accept the idea that you are helpless, you stop acting — and that is how real power is surrendered. Belief in your own agency is the first form of power.

Walker published this in the early 1980s, shortly after The Color Purple brought her major public recognition. The Reagan era in the United States represented a political rollback of many civil rights gains, and Walker's work consistently urged Black women and marginalized people not to internalize the powerlessness that systems of oppression tried to impose on them.

American novelist, poet, and activist whose 1982 novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, making her the first Black American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. Her work explores the struggles of Black women in the American South with unflinching honesty.