Saul Alinsky Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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.

Saul Alinsky
Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, it results in confusion, fear, and retreat. [...] The third rule is: Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Saul Alinsky
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

Saul Alinsky
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. In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.

Saul Alinsky
One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.

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

Saul Alinsky
The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.

Saul Alinsky
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a dangerous enemy.

Saul Alinsky
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

Saul Alinsky
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.

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

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

Saul Alinsky
No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.

Saul Alinsky
Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives—agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.

Saul Alinsky
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.

Saul Alinsky
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....

Saul Alinsky
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.

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

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

Saul Alinsky
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.

Saul Alinsky
Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.

Saul Alinsky
It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy... on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.

Saul Alinsky
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,

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

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

Saul Alinsky
The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions.

Saul Alinsky
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.

Saul Alinsky
Do you like people? Most people claim that they like people with, of course, a "few exceptions." When the exceptions are added together it becomes clear that they include a vast majority of the people. It becomes equally clear that most people like just a few people, their kind of people, and either do not actively care for or actively dislike most of the "other" people.

Saul Alinsky
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 known.

Saul Alinsky
Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked
with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy.

Saul Alinsky