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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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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
Opposition
Effective
Ethics
Rule
Means
Unethical
Ends
Ninth
Mean
Automatically
Judged
More quotes by Saul Alinsky
A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
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A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
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No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
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The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
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The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
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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.
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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.
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Last guys don't finish nice.
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Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
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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.
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Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.
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Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
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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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Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.
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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.
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A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
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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.
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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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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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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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