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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.