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

Saul Alinsky

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Saul Alinsky
Age: 63 †
Born: 1909
Born: January 30
Died: 1972
Died: June 12
Activist
Human Rights Activist
Sociologist
Trade Unionist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Saul David Alinsky
Firsts
First
Always
Tactics
Thinking
Thinks
Rule
Enemy
Remember
Power

More quotes by Saul Alinsky

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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.
Saul Alinsky
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America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
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The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
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One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
Saul Alinsky
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An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.
Saul Alinsky
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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.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
Saul Alinsky
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The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Saul Alinsky
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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
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No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
Saul Alinsky
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In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.
Saul Alinsky
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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
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Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
Saul Alinsky
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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 Alinsky
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Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
Saul Alinsky
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The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins
Saul Alinsky
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The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.
Saul Alinsky
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As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. 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.
Saul Alinsky
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Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.
Saul Alinsky