Quote

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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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
Opportunity
Conviction
Truth
Generally
Power
Decisions
Right
Reach
People
Destiny
Control
Destinies
Decision
Freely
Belief
Fixed

More quotes by 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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Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.
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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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.
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 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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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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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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The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
Saul Alinsky
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The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Saul Alinsky
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The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
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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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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They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.
Saul Alinsky
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You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.
Saul Alinsky
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A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
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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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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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