Who really said it

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any

Q: Did Alice Walker say "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any"?

Not confirmed. Credited to Alice Walker everywhere the line appears, and squarely consistent with her womanist and activist writing — but no primary source pins it. The earliest citation anyone offers is a 2004 quotation anthology that simply reprints the line without saying where Walker said or wrote it. Neither Wikiquote nor Quote Investigator has tied it to any Walker book, essay, speech, or interview.

Attributed to Alice Walker b. 1944 · American novelist, poet & activist

Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Credited to Alice Walker everywhere the line appears, and squarely consistent with her womanist and activist writing — but no primary source pins it. The earliest citation anyone offers is a 2004 quotation anthology that simply reprints the line without saying where Walker said or wrote it. Neither Wikiquote nor Quote Investigator has tied it to any Walker book, essay, speech, or interview.

Last verified 15 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any” attributed to Alice Walker. Widely credited to Walker, but no primary source has been identified; the earliest documented citation is William P. Martin, comp., The Best Liberal Quotes Ever (Sourcebooks, 2004), p. 173. Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the world of Alice Walker — American novelist, poet & activist; author of The Color Purple. Theme: "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail

Earliest documented citation: The Best Liberal Quotes Ever: Why the Left Is Right (2004), p. 173
Compiler & publisher: William P. Martin, comp. · Sourcebooks, Naperville, IL
Primary source: None located — no Walker book, essay, speech, letter, or interview identified
Specialist ruling: None — Quote Investigator has not examined this line

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. No primary source located

No fuller context can be shown: the quote has never been located inside a Walker text, so there is no surrounding passage to quote. Every appearance found is the bare sentence, already detached from whatever it came from.

Wikiquote: Alice Walker

What we checked

Wikiquote’s Alice Walker page ↗ carries the line with a single citation — “As quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever: Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin, p. 173.” It sits in the general Quotes section, not under the page’s subsections for The Color Purple or In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; the page has no Misattributed or Disputed section.
That cited book is a compiled anthology of quotations ↗ (Sourcebooks, 2004) — a secondary collection published twenty-plus years after Walker’s major works. An anthology reprinting a line is not evidence of where the line came from.
Quote Investigator’s Alice Walker tag ↗ lists its work on her attributions — the “activism pays the rent” line — but contains no investigation of this quote. There is no specialist finding to defer to, so we decline to manufacture one.
The aggregators that spread it supply nothing: Goodreads ↗ lists no source and notes its quotes are community-added and unverified, and LibQuotes ↗ gives no citation despite branding itself around sourced quotes.

No rights status can be asserted, because the work containing this line has never been identified — and we will not claim public domain for something we cannot source. What can be said with confidence is that it is certainly not public domain: Alice Walker was born in 1944 ↗, so any work of hers was first published far later than 1931 and would remain in copyright. If the line is genuinely Walker’s, it belongs to her and her publishers; if it is an anonymous paraphrase, its origin is simply unknown. Either way, treat it as protected.

Fact-check

How a sourceless quote hardens into fact

This is not a case of the wrong author — it is a case of no evidence. The attribution to Walker may well be correct; it has simply never been checked. Here is how the gap gets papered over:

Alice Waters name-drift

Goodreads carries the identical sentence attributed to Alice Waters ↗, the chef and food activist, also with no source. A shared first name is all it takes for a floating quote to change hands.

Invented book citations confabulation

Asked where the line comes from, automated summaries named The Temple of My Familiar and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens with equal confidence — two different books, neither supported by the pages cited. Notably, Wikiquote ↗ has subsections for both of Walker’s major works and places this quote in neither.

Quote aggregators unverified

Goodreads ↗ lists it with thousands of likes and no source, warning that its quotes are community-added and unverified; LibQuotes ↗ supplies none either. Repetition at scale reads as confirmation, but nothing has been confirmed.

A shortened variant paraphrase

A trimmed form — “People give up their power by thinking they don’t have any” — also circulates. With no primary text to check either version against, there is no way to say which, if either, is what Walker actually wrote.

The honest answer: Alice Walker is very likely the author, and the sentiment fits her work — but the earliest citation anyone can produce is a 2004 quotation anthology ↗ published two decades after her best-known books, and it names no source. Until a Walker text surfaces, this is attributed, not verified.

Context

Why this one is hard to pin down

The sentence has the texture of something written, not said — balanced, epigrammatic, built to be quoted. That is part of why it travels so well, and part of why it is so hard to trace: a line this portable detaches from its origin almost immediately and then circulates on its own momentum.

What makes the trail unusually treacherous here is that the quote is plausible. Walker really does write about power and who is persuaded they lack it. So nobody ever stopped to ask for a citation — the attribution felt self-evidently right, and an unchecked attribution repeated for decades looks identical to a verified one.

A quote that sounds exactly like its author is the hardest kind to fact-check — nobody thinks to ask.

What we searched, and what we found

We checked Wikiquote ↗, whose only citation is a 2004 anthology; Quote Investigator’s Alice Walker tag ↗, which has never covered this line; and LibQuotes ↗ and Goodreads ↗, which supply none.

Worth recording honestly: during research, automated search summaries confidently asserted the quote came from Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar — and then, just as confidently, from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Neither claim was supported by the pages being summarised, and the two contradict each other. That is a live demonstration of how this quote’s phantom sourcing gets manufactured.

Full-text searching of book corpora was attempted but returned nothing usable: control searches for phrases known to exist also came back empty, meaning those tools were not functioning and their silence proves nothing either way. We record that as a limitation rather than as evidence of absence.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Alice Walkeren.wikiquote.org

Lists the quote, but cites only the 2004 Martin anthology — and files it under general Quotes rather than under any Walker book.

Alice Walker (tag)quoteinvestigator.com

Quote Investigator has traced other Walker attributions, but has never investigated this line — there is no specialist ruling to defer to.

The Best Liberal Quotes Ever (2004)archive.org

The one book Wikiquote cites: a compiled anthology of quotations from Sourcebooks, not a Walker primary source.

Alice Walkeren.wikipedia.org

Biography and bibliography — born 1944, Pulitzer and National Book Award in 1983. Does not contain this quote.

Alice Walker quotationslibquotes.com

A site branded around “sourced quotes” that nonetheless carries this line with no source at all.

The same line, credited to Alice Waterswww.goodreads.com

Evidence of name-drift: the identical sentence filed under the chef Alice Waters, also with no source.

The attributed author

Who is Alice Walker?

Alice Walker

b. 9 February 1944 · American novelist, poet & activist; author of The Color Purple

Alice Walker was born on 9 February 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the daughter of sharecroppers. Her 1982 novel The Color Purple won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, and her 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens gave the word womanist its currency. Power — who is told they have none, and what happens when they believe it — is a genuine and recurring subject of her work, which is precisely why this particular sentence sounds so much like her.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Earliest documented in: William P. Martin, comp., The Best Liberal Quotes Ever: Why the Left Is Right (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2004), 173. No primary Alice Walker source has been identified for this wording.

MLA (9th ed.)

Martin, William P., compiler. The Best Liberal Quotes Ever: Why the Left Is Right. Sourcebooks, 2004, p. 173.

APA (7th ed.)

Martin, W. P. (Comp.). (2004). The best liberal quotes ever: Why the left is right. Sourcebooks.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-most-common-way-people-give-up-their-power-is-by