You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.
Interpretation
Respect and positive feelings are essential for influence over others.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes that genuine influence and the ability to lead or guide others depend on a foundation of respect and goodwill. If you harbor contempt or disdain for others, your ability to inspire, persuade, or make a positive impact on their lives is severely diminished, as contempt breeds division and resistance.
In practice
In a team meeting where respect is lacking among members, one can reference this quote to encourage a more positive atmosphere.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.
Many marriages would be better if the husband and the wife clearly understood that they are on the same side.
She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.
Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm, but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack - not kindness, they have kindness - but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She though always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.
Empathy isnβt just something that happens to us β a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain β itβs also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.
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