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

More quotes by 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.
Saul Alinsky
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Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
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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A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
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.
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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Last guys don't finish nice.
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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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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Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.
Saul Alinsky
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Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
Saul Alinsky
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Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.
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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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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Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
Saul Alinsky
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The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Saul Alinsky
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The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
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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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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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
Saul Alinsky