An appeal to pity (also called argumentum ad misericordiam or the Galileo argument) is a fallacy in which someone tries to win support for an argument or idea by exploiting his or her opponent's feelings of pity or guilt. It is a specific kind of appeal to emotion.
Famous quotes containing the words appeal to, appeal and/or pity:
“Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it’s the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“What a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time,—the eternal laws!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)