Quotes by Saul Alinsky

“In one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "T...”

“There were those few, and there will be more, who really liked people, loved peopleall people. They were the human torches setting aflame the hearts of men so that they passionately fought for the ...”

“It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event, you are not even a failure. You're just not there.”

“If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community, I would not...”

“There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.”

“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 caus...”

“I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.”

“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.”

“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

“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 trave...”

“Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed he who fears corruption fears life. ”

“First rule of change is controversy. You can't get away from it for the simple reason all issues are controversial. Change means movement, and movement means friction, and friction means heat, and ...”

“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...”

“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”

“Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futu...”

“Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.”

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins...”

“Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear the most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of ou...”

“Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailin...”

“No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.”