Alinsky Quotes

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

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

The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead. ~ Saul Alinsky

Mark Twain once put it, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Power ~ Saul D. 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 D. Alinsky

Saul Alinsky advised his followers to level sharp attacks against their opponents with the goal of goading them into rash counterattacks that would then discredit them. To avoid falling into this trap, those of us who are interested in civil discussion should prepare ourselves to refrain from reacting in fear or anger to those who disagree with us or even attack us. ~ Ben Carson

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. ~ Saul Alinsky

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. ~ 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 D. Alinsky

For Hillary, gangsterism is not merely a matter of means; it is also her end. Hillary wants to be the crime boss of America. That is the only way to satisfy her unquenchable desire for money, power, and social control. As we will see in this book, Hillary is a criminal who found the criminal practices of Saul Alinsky to be too weak-kneed for her taste, and Alinsky was a gangster who found the criminal practices of the Al Capone gang to be a tad sentimental. In short, Hillary is the true Democrat, the gangster par excellence. I suspect this is why the Democratic establishment lined up so quickly behind her. While the Republicans had a real primary, hotly contested, the Democrats had a primary in which Bernie seemed to win again and again but never seemed to make a dent in Hillary's lead. That's because the Democratic super-delegates were uniformly in her camp, even though there was throughout the campaign the risk that she would be indicted. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new. ~ 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. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events. ~ Saul Alinsky

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. ~ Saul Alinsky

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion. ~ Saul Alinsky

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Saul 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

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 D. Alinsky

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. ~ 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

People always do the right thing for the wrong reason. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

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. ~ Saul Alinsky

History is a relay of revolutions. ~ Saul Alinsky

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

The standards of judgement 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 D. 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

You regard yourself as tolerant, and in that one adjective you most fittingly describe yourself. You really don't like people you tolerate them. You are very tolerant, MR. BUT. ~ Saul D. 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

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

Last guys don't finish nice. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

Though some student activists of the 1960s may have idolized Alinsky, he didn't particularly idolize them. ~ Bill Dedman

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

The real action is in the enemy's reaction. ~ Saul D. 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

The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results. ~ Saul Alinsky

No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation. ~ Saul Alinsky

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions. ~ Saul Alinsky

If most of the people in the country believe that America is generally fair and decent, it becomes more difficult for Saul Alinsky types to recruit change agents and for those on the Far Left to undermine our Constitution. Hence the constant bad-mouthing of our nation to impressionable young people, preparing them to be ripe for manipulation at the appropriate time. ~ Ben Carson

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

Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular. ~ Saul Alinsky

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. ~ Saul Alinsky

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

If one wants to act, the dilemma is how and where; there is no "when?" with time running out, the time is obviously now. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers. ~ Saul Alinsky

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. ~ 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

I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. ~ 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

Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith ... Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. ~ Saul Alinsky

In one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and motivations of Saul Alinsky," writes Saul. "I answered two of them incorrectly. ~ Nicholas Von Hoffman

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 D. Alinsky

Not only does a single- or even a dual-issue organization condemn you to a small organization, it is axiomatic that a single-issue organization won't last. An organization needs action as an individual needs oxygen. With only one or two issues there will certainly be a lapse of action, and then comes death. Multiple issues mean constant action and life. An ~ Saul D. 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 men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores. ~ Saul Alinsky

This is the world as it is. This is where you start. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

The significant changes in history have been made by revolutions. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

Do not let the Obama administration fool you with all their cunning Alinsky methods. And if you don't know what that method is, I implore you to get the book 'Rules for Radicals,' by Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama is very well trained in these methods. ~ Jon Voight

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

The tactics of Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama are geared toward wealth redistribution. ~ Monica Crowley

The first step in community organization is community disorganization. ~ Saul Alinsky

Never let a crisis go to waste ~ 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 D. Alinsky

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

Obama wouldn't have been voted president if he weren't black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot of money have a lot of money, because she's black. It was Oprah. No, it can't be. Yes, it is. There's a lot of guilt out there, show we're not racists, we'll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth ... If Obama weren't black he'd be a tour guide in Honolulu or he'd be teaching Saul Alinsky constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations. It is one of the classic American fairy tales. From ~ Saul D. 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

I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music would be relatively quiet. The hundred blacks who would be given tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; them the people would go to the symphony hall--with obvious consequences. ~ Saul D. 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 D. 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

Power goes to two poles-to those who've got the money and those who've got the people. ~ Saul Alinsky

The life of man upon earth is a warfare ... - JOB 7:1 ~ Saul D. 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

Alinsky's 1971 book, 'Rules for Radicals,' is a favorite of the Obamas. Michele Obama quoted it at the Democratic Convention. One Alinsky tactic is to 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' That's what the White House did in targeting Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer. ~ Karl Rove

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

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

A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises. ~ Saul Alinsky

The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means ... ~ 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

If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. ~ Saul Alinsky

Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance, creating a mass ego. CONFLICT ~ Saul D. 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

A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. ~ 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

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. ~ Saul Alinsky

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. ~ Saul Alinsky

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. ~ 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 opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, pointed out the variations in ethical definitions by virtue of where you stand. Mendoza said to Tanner, "I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich." Tanner replied, "I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands." The ~ Saul D. 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

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. ~ Saul Alinsky

Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party. ~ Bill Dedman

Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever - Saul Alinsky to his staff shortly before his death, June 1972. ~ Hunter S. Thompson