Saul Alinsky - Rules for Radicals (1971)

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

Saul Alinsky
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - 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 price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

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

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

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
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
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
A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

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

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
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
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
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
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.)

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

Saul Alinsky
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, then we have reconciliation.

Saul Alinsky
To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. 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.

Saul Alinsky