Quote

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
Rule
Means
Unethical
Ends
Ninth
Mean
Automatically
Judged
Opposition
Effective
Ethics

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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.
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Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
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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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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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Always remember the first rule of power tactics power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
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A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
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The very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer.
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A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
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Change means movement. Movement means friction.
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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 price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
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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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Last guys don't finish nice.
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Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
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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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The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
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Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
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The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me.' (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. 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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