Saul Alinsky Quotes

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.

True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.

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.

Control healthcare and you control the people

Never let a crisis go to waste

History is a relay of revolutions.

In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.

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.

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.

The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.

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.

The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.

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.

Power just goes to two poles — to those who've got money, and those who've got people.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

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.

Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.

One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

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.

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.

The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.

The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.

Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.

America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.

A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.

Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.

Change means movement. Movement means friction.

The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.

Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.

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.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

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.

Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.