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

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
Together
Must
People
Humanist
Organization
Comes
Order
Change
Power

More quotes by 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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I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism…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.
Saul Alinsky
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Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
Saul Alinsky
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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.
Saul Alinsky
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You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.
Saul Alinsky
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Last guys don't finish nice.
Saul Alinsky
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A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
Saul Alinsky
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The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Saul Alinsky
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In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.
Saul Alinsky
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Change means movement. Movement means friction.
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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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 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.
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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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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One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.
Saul Alinsky
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The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
Saul Alinsky