American community organizer (1909-1972)
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons—afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
The people of America are red, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. Their eyes are blue, black, and brown, and all the shades in between. Their hair is straight, curly, kinky, and most of it in between. They are tall and short, slim and fat, athletic and anaemic, and most of them in between. They are the different peoples of the world becoming more and more the "in between." They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new mankind--a people of the world. Their face is the face of the future.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
Last guys don't finish nice.
SAUL ALINSKY
attributed, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All
If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
History is a relay of revolutions.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
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
Rules for Radicals
The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories. They have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the past and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the unknown.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
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.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
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.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Radicals want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful. They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not auger well for an ever expanding democratic way of life. Radicals want to see the established political rights or political freedom of the common man augmented by economic freedom. They believe that Lincoln's statement that a nation cannot exist half-free and half-slave is applicable to the entire world and includes economic as well as political freedom. In short, radicals are convinced that the marriage of political rights will produce a social morality in which the Golden Rule will replace the gold standard.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
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
Reveille for Radicals
Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.
SAUL ALINSKY
"Saul Alinsky: A candid conversation with the feisty radical organizer", Playboy, Mar. 1972