Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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

Power just goes to two poles — to those who've got money, and those who've got people.

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.

History is a relay of revolutions.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.

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

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

Last guys don't finish nice.

The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.

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.

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.

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.

The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'

People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.

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 chance the future.