Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
Interpretation
True sympathy involves deep personal engagement, unlike superficial pity.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes the difference between mere pity and genuine sympathy. He argues that while pity is often an impersonal act, such as sending a check, true sympathy requires one to invest emotionally and spiritually, demonstrating a deeper personal connection and commitment to others' suffering and needs.
In practice
In a speech about community support, one might say: 'As Martin Luther King, Jr. wisely noted, true sympathy requires deep personal connection.'
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 didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise.
It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, 'You waited for your father to die; why couldn't you have waited for me to die?' I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.
It was never my intention to marry anybody. Economics are basically the only reason to get married, but I'm very glad I did it.
Associate only with positive, focused people who you can learn from and who will not drain your valuable energy with uninspiring attitudes. By developing relationships with those committed to constant improvement and the pursuit of the best that life has to offer, you will have plenty of company on your path to the top of whatever mountain you seek to climb.
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