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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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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
Means
Varies
Ends
Vary
Mean
Ethics
Issue
Concern
Personal
Issues
Interest
Inversely

More quotes by Saul Alinsky

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Last guys don't finish nice.
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A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Change means movement. Movement means friction.
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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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The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
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The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
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A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
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America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.
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You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.
Saul Alinsky
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Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Saul Alinsky
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Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
Saul Alinsky
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The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
Saul Alinsky
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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.
Saul Alinsky
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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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Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing.
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