Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.
Saul Alinsky
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Organizer
Start
Reality
Would
Like
World
More quotes by Saul Alinsky
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
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
Saul Alinsky
One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.
Saul Alinsky
Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy.
Saul Alinsky
The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
Saul Alinsky
In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.
Saul Alinsky
The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
Saul Alinsky
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
Power just goes to two poles — to those who've got money, and those who've got people.
Saul Alinsky
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
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Saul Alinsky
A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
Saul Alinsky
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
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
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Saul Alinsky
Change means movement. Movement means friction.
Saul Alinsky
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.
Saul Alinsky
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
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
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
