Saul Alinsky Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Saul Alinsky
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

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

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

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

Saul Alinsky
There is no such thing as a single problem … all problems are interrelated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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.

Saul Alinsky
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
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.

Saul Alinsky
It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You're just not there.

Saul Alinsky
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Saul Alinsky
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.

Saul Alinsky
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.

Saul Alinsky