Saul Alinsky
Saul Alinsky
Saul David Alinskywas an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his 1971 book Rules for Radicals...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth30 January 1909
CountryUnited States of America
laughter adventure passion
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.
change mean movement
Change means movement. Movement means friction.
beautiful faith believe
We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.
enemy reactions rules-for-radicals
The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
life mother children
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.
can-do
Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.
airports mao runway
Quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara... are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
world fantasy judgment
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.
dream lying believe
We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.
democracy alive dictatorship
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.
civilization people religion
Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.
law greed world
In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed.
tragedy faces looks
Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
two our-world kind
Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.