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Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

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
Rules
Enemy
Live
Book
Make

More quotes by 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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The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.
Saul Alinsky
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The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
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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Last guys don't finish nice.
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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Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.
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 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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The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
Saul Alinsky
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Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.
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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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
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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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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.
Saul Alinsky
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The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
Saul Alinsky
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The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
Saul Alinsky
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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