Saul David Alinsky was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Profoundly inspirational Saul Alinsky quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
Famous Saul Alinsky Quotes
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
Control healthcare and you control the people. Saul Alinsky
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. 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
Never let a crisis go to waste. 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
Control healthcare and you control the people. Saul Alinsky
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. 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
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
True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within. Saul Alinsky
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. Saul Alinsky
The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. Saul Alinsky
There were those few, and there will be more, who really liked people, loved people all people. They were the human torches setting aflame the hearts of men so that they passionately fought for the rights of their fellow men, all men. They were hated, feared, and branded as radicals. They wore the epithet of radical as a badge of honor. They fought for the right of men to govern themselves, for the right of men to walk erect as free men and not grovel before kings, for the Bill of Rights, for the abolition of slavery, for public education, and for everything decent and worth while. They loved men and fought for them. Their neighbor’s misery was their misery. They acted as they believed. Saul Alinsky
The very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom Lucifer. Saul Alinsky
No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation. To attempt to operate on a good will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something the world has not yet experienced. Saul Alinsky
In the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems. Saul Alinsky
Mankind has been and is divided into three parts the Haves, the Have Nots, and the Have a Little, Want Mores. Saul Alinsky
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage. Saul Alinsky
The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. Saul Alinsky
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. Saul Alinsky
All effective actions require the passport of morality. Saul Alinsky
If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. Saul Alinsky
Democracy is not an end; it is the best political means available toward the achievement of these values. 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
Push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside. Saul Alinsky
The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree. Saul Alinsky
Between the Haves and Have Nots are the Have a Little, Want Mores the middle class. Torn between upholding the status quo to protect the little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they become split personalities. They could be described as social, economic, and political schizoids. Generally, they seek the safe way, where they can profit by change and yet not risk losing the little they have. They insist on a minimum of three aces before playing a hand in the poker game of revolution. Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia. Today in Western society and particularly in the United States they comprise the majority of our population. Saul Alinsky
Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose. Saul Alinsky
This is the world as it is. This is where you start. Saul Alinsky
If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them. Saul Alinsky
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. Saul D. Alinsky
The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means. Saul Alinsky
Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, Is this true? Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality? To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest. Saul Alinsky
The fourth rule is 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
If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them. Saul Alinsky
The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results. Saul Alinsky
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Saul Alinsky
There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. Saul Alinsky
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. We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it. Saul Alinsky
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. Saul Alinsky
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. Saul Alinsky
The thirteenth rule of radical tactics Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Saul Alinsky
Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem. Saul D. Alinsky
The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Saul Alinsky
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough. Saul D. 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. Saul Alinsky
In the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems. 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
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. Saul Alinsky
Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical from all our legends, mythology and history and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins or which is which, the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom Lucifer. Saul Alinsky
In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property. Saul D. Alinsky
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself. 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
The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead. Saul Alinsky
People always do the right thing for the wrong reason. Saul Alinsky
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough. Saul Alinsky
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. Saul D. Alinsky
Power just goes to two poles to those who’ve got money, and those who’ve got people. Saul Alinsky
A bit of a blurred vision of a better world. Much of an organizer’s daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. It is as though as an artist he is painting a tiny leaf. It is inevitable that sooner or later he will react with What am I doing spending my whole life just painting one little leaf? The hell with it, I quit. What keeps him going is a blurred vision of a great mural where other artists organizers are painting their bits, and each piece is essential to the total. Saul Alinsky
From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Saul Alinsky
Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward. Saul Alinsky
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. Saul Alinsky
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 delegatepos. Saul D. Alinsky
Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing, it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death. Saul Alinsky
Political realists see the world as it is an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self interest. Saul D. Alinsky
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. Saul Alinsky
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself. Saul Alinsky
The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible. Saul Alinsky
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Saul D. Alinsky
The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at. 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 D. Alinsky
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. Saul Alinsky
Last guys don’t finish nice. Saul Alinsky
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