Saul Alinksy has long served as an organizer in community organizations and was an independent revolutionary himself.
This list includes the most popular quotes by Saul Alinsky. The American political philosopher Saul Alinksy remained active in the community, fighting for social justice.
Alinsky devoted all of the rest of his life to promoting poverty and influencers for the development of the poorest. Throughout his lifetime, his activism has involved conflict and compromise.
He managed to bring together ordinary individuals and businesses with common grievances, and therefore, his revolution was nearly unstoppable. Here is a list of well-known Saul Alinsky quotes to boost your confidence and self-esteem.
Saul Alinsky Quotes about Politics
Political awareness may assist you in determining the right path of conduct for yourself as well as your community in a plethora of instances. These quotes will be perfect for you!
"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."
"Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."
"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."
"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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises—which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"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 chance the future."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"Change comes from power, and power comes from organization."
"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."
"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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society."
Saul Alinsky Quotes on Leadership
(Take a look at some of the most famous uplifting Saul Alinsky Quotes.)
To lend a clear direction and purpose to yourself, you must read the following quotes by 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."
"Keep the pressure on. Never let up. Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"Always remember the first rule of power tactics."
"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."
"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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
"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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"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."
"Representatives of formal agencies judge leadership according to their own criteria, evaluate what is good or bad in the community according to their own standards, and understand life in the community only when interpreted according to their own code or standards"
- 'Reveille for Radicals'.
"Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy."
"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...."
"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"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."
" 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."
"Last guys don't finish nice."
"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions."
"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."
"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."
"I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism…"
Saul Alinsky Quotes on Faith
Having faith in themselves is a major hurdle for most individuals. Here are some groundbreaking rules and quotes for you.
"Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests."
"We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it."
"The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me.' (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other."
"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 only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions."
"It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith."
"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."
"People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others."
"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."
"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."
"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 Quotes on Life
The following quotes will shower you with all the motivation and encouragement you need in your life to be successful.
"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."
"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;"
"This is the world as it is. This is where you start."
"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."
"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."
"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 greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself."
"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 delegates."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"Never do for someone what they can do for themselves."
"Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom?"
"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."
"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."
"What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. 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."
- 'Rules for Radicals'.
"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."
