Top 73 Saul Alinsky Quotes
#1. The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me.' (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
Saul Alinsky
#2. The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
Saul Alinsky
#3. Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.
Saul Alinsky
#4. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Saul Alinsky
#5. 'The Prince' was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. 'Rules for Radicals' is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Saul Alinsky
#6. Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.
Saul Alinsky
#7. Quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara ... are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
Saul Alinsky
#9. The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.
Saul Alinsky
#10. Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
Saul Alinsky
#11. Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day, and 8,000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, 'Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al.'
Saul Alinsky
#12. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Saul Alinsky
#13. Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
Saul Alinsky
#14. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
Saul Alinsky
#15. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.
Saul Alinsky
#16. A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
Saul Alinsky
#17. Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
Saul Alinsky
#18. Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
Saul Alinsky
#19. The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.
Saul Alinsky
#20. My only fixed truth is a belief in people: a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions.
Saul Alinsky
#21. The first step in community organization is community disorganization.
Saul Alinsky
#22. The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
Saul Alinsky
#23. First rule of change is controversy. You can't get away from it for the simple reason all issues are controversial. Change means movement, and movement means friction, and friction means heat, and heat means controversy.
Saul Alinsky
#24. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Saul Alinsky
#25. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
Saul Alinsky
#26. People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.
Saul Alinsky
#27. No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
Saul Alinsky
#28. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
Saul Alinsky
#29. Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.
Saul Alinsky
#30. The fourth rule is: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
Saul Alinsky
#31. If the ends don't justify the means, what does?
Saul Alinsky
#32. America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.
Saul Alinsky
#33. Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.
Saul Alinsky
#34. The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.
Saul Alinsky
#35. A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.
Saul Alinsky
#36. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
Saul Alinsky
#37. The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
Saul Alinsky
#38. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
Saul Alinsky
#39. The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.
Saul Alinsky
#40. The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means ...
Saul Alinsky
#41. Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing
but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.
Saul Alinsky
#42. The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'
Saul Alinsky
#43. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Saul Alinsky
#44. Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked
with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy.
Saul Alinsky
#45. The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.
Saul Alinsky
#46. Change comes from power, and power comes from organization.
Saul Alinsky
#47. Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
Saul Alinsky
#48. There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
Saul Alinsky
#50. Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.
Saul Alinsky
#51. I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
Saul Alinsky
#52. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
Saul Alinsky
#53. The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded.
Saul Alinsky
#55. The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins
Saul Alinsky
#56. The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at
Saul Alinsky
#57. To the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation ... If you start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, you're 30 percent ahead.
Saul Alinsky
#58. From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.
Saul Alinsky
#59. The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
Saul Alinsky
#60. It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event, you are not even a failure. You're just not there.
Saul Alinsky
#61. Control healthcare and you control the people
Saul Alinsky
#62. The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
Saul Alinsky
#63. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Saul Alinsky
#64. Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.
Saul Alinsky
#65. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Saul Alinsky
#67. Power goes to two poles-to those who've got the money and those who've got the people.
Saul Alinsky
#68. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Saul Alinsky
#69. The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.
Saul Alinsky
#70. In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.
Saul Alinsky
#71. They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.
Saul Alinsky
#72. Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
Saul Alinsky
#73. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
Saul Alinsky
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