Saul Alinsky Quotes

From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams... only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues.... Until he has those means and power instruments, his tactics are very different from power tactics. Therefore, every move revolves around one central point: how many recruits will this bring into the organization, whether by means of local organizations, churches, service groups, labor Unions, corner gangs, or as individuals.

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

Let the liberal turn to the course of action, the course of all radicals, and the amused look vanishes from the face of society as it snarls, “That’s radical!” Society has good reason to fear the radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.

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.

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

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.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.

Control healthcare and you control the people

A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.

The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins

Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.

A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.

Do one of three things. One, go 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.

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

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.

The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.

Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.

The organized labor movement as it is constituted today is as much a concomitant of a capitalist economy as is capital. Organized labor is predicated upon the basic premise of collective bargaining between employers and employees. This premise can obtain only for an employer-employee type of society. If the labor movement is to maintain its own identity and security, it must of necessity protect that kind of society.

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.

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.

Never let a crisis go to waste

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.

An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.

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.

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.

History is a relay of revolutions.

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.

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.)

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

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

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.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

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

Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclearpowered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

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

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.

In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.

Radicals, on the other hand, 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 augur for an ever expanding democratic way of life.