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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
World
Organizer
Start
Reality
Would
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More quotes by 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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The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
Saul Alinsky
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The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.
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The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
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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 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.
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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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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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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.
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A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
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.
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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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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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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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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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A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
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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Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.
Saul Alinsky
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The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.
Saul Alinsky