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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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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
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Problem
Firsts
First
Organizer
Beginning
Problems
Issues

More quotes by Saul Alinsky

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The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
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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.
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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.
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The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
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Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclearpowered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
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Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
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Power just goes to two poles — to those who've got money, and those who've got people.
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Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
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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 cry of the Have-Nots has never been give us our hearts, but always get off our backs they ask not for love but for breathing space.
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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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.
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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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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.
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.
Saul Alinsky
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The despair is there now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.
Saul Alinsky
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Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy.
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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History is a relay of revolutions.
Saul Alinsky