Quotes from Saul D. Alinsky

This is the world as it is. This is where you start.

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.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

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

In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that "Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property.

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.

People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others.

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 delegatepos

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.

The life of man upon earth is a warfare … — JOB 7:1

The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice

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

A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

All of life is partisan. There is no dispassionate objectivity. The revolutionary ideology is not confined to a specific limited formula. It is a series of general principles, rooted in Lincoln's May 19, 1856, statement: "Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.

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

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

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

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

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.

The real action is in the enemy's reaction.

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.

These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness.

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

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