Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Saul Alinsky
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Saul Alinsky.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community, I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
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.'
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Last guys don't finish nice.
No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
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.
If the ends don't justify the means, what does?
The first step in community organization is community disorganization.
History is a relay of revolutions.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
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.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded.
Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events.
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.
The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.
We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
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.
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.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'
I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
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.
As an organizer, I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer.
Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.
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.
Never let a crisis go to waste
In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.
The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.
The very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer.
A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism.
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.
Control healthcare and you control the people
If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
Theres another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. 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 change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.
The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
The organizers first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.
True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.
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.
The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.
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