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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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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
Devil
Side
Sides
Decisively
Devils
Angels
Acts
Conviction
Angel

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The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
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Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
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Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
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Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.
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If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.
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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.
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Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.
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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.
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No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
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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.
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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.
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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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The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
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