Explore Quotes by 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 delegates.

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

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.

Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

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

Change means movement. Movement means friction.

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.

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.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

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.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

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.

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.

Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.

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.

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.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

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.

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.