Saul Alinsky Famous Quotes
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If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community, I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out.
My only fixed truth is a belief in people: a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
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.
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.
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.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'
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.
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.
Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.
The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
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.
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
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.
I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.
The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins
The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means ...
One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
Never let a crisis go to waste
No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.
I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism ... The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.
Power goes to two poles-to those who've got the money and those who've got the people.
All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
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.
The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization.
History is a relay of revolutions.
A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
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.
The people of America are red, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. Their eyes are blue, black, and brown, and all the shades in between. Their hair is straight, curly, kinky, and most of it in between. They are tall and short, slim and fat, athletic and anaemic, and most of them in between. They are the different peoples of the world becoming more and more the "in between." They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new mankind
a people of the world. Their face is the face of the future.
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.
Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.
The first step in community organization is community disorganization.
We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.
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.
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
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.
Radicals, on the other hand, want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful. They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not augur for an ever expanding democratic way of life.
If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
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. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events.
Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.
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.
The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
The end is what you want, the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work ... The real arena is corrupt and bloody.