A Reflection on Quiet Resistance and the Strength of Small Acts
History, we are told, is written by the victors. But if you look closely—beneath the battle cries, beyond the coronations and coups—you will find it is also annotated, line by careful line, by those who were never supposed to have a voice at all.
I’ve long believed that the most profound expressions of power are not always loud, nor officially sanctioned, nor wrapped in ermine robes. No, the real magic lies in quiet resistance—in the power that blooms in unlikely places, underfoot, uninvited.
This truth was first impressed upon me not by a statesman or philosopher, but by Mrs. Goodridge, my school’s long-serving librarian. She was a petite woman with an encyclopedic memory, an unflinching gaze, and an uncanny ability to detect hidden snacks tucked under shirts. But her real power? She refused to be rushed.
In a school that pulsed with competition and male adolescent urgency, she moved through the corridors like a gentle counterspell. When the headmaster declared that certain “non-exam” books would be removed to make room for more “useful material,” Mrs. Goodridge quietly re-catalogued the banned volumes and placed them in a box beneath the desk marked “Lost and Found.” A boy who asked for Lovelace or Achebe knew where to look. She broke no laws, caused no fuss—she simply insisted, through small, daily acts, on a broader vision of what mattered.
This, I think, is the power of the powerless: not the ability to dominate, but the refusal to disappear.
Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who later became president, once wrote that the real threat to totalitarianism was not violent uprising, but people who “live in truth.” That is, people who refused to lie, even politely. Who refused to pretend the emperor was clothed. Who painted truth on walls, or wrote poems under pseudonyms, or simply sat in public spaces when they had been told not to.
This is the kind of power the powerful most fear: unruly, unmanageable, unbought. It is the power that sings in the songs of the enslaved, whispers in the prayers of prisoners, flourishes in the cracks of oppressive systems like green shoots in pavement.
Theology, too, is full of such subversive strength. Consider Mary’s Magnificat—not a lullaby, but a revolutionary cry: He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. Or the desert fathers and mothers, who fled the empire not in cowardice, but to birth a different kind of moral authority. Or the communities of base ecclesial liberation theology—poor in resources but rich in purpose—gathering in kitchens to reimagine scripture as a weapon of hope.
One does not need a title to wield power. One needs conviction. And perhaps a quiet kitchen table where truth is shared, not shouted.
Now, I do not romanticise the margins. There is nothing noble about suffering needlessly. But I do believe that those without official power often see most clearly how power operates. And sometimes, in seeing clearly, they begin to resist—by refusing to hate, by choosing to forgive, by telling the story that others would rather be forgotten.
So, what does all this mean for us, you and I, who may find ourselves somewhere in the middle—not emperors, not exiles, but ordinary folk trying to live with decency and purpose?
It means this: we, too, can choose where and how we lend our weight. With every act—every shared meal, every defended colleague, every principled “no” in a room where silence is expected—we participate in the long, slow turning of history’s tide.
And when we feel powerless, let us remember Mrs. Goodridge, and Baldwin, and the Magnificat. Let us remember that the world does not change only through revolutions, but through uncompromised presence—the kind of steady truth that wears down injustice not with a hammer, but with a quiet, resolute hand.
