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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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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
Start
Reality
Would
Like
World
Organizer

More quotes by Saul Alinsky

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Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
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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No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
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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The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
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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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 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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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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Power just goes to two poles — to those who've got money, and those who've got people.
Saul Alinsky
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Last guys don't finish nice.
Saul Alinsky
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You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
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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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.
Saul Alinsky
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The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.
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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Always remember the first rule of power tactics power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
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