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
angel men enemy
It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral;
enemy rules-for-radicals expertise
Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
nice guy enemy
Last guys don't finish nice.
angel devil sides
One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
waste crisis
Never let a crisis go to waste
gun bullets ballots
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.
change mean movement
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.
despair social radical
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.
dream sleep army
From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.
letting-go attitude acceptance
Theres another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. 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 futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.
4th-of-july enemy individual
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
political tactics shifting
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.
loyalty spring rights
The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
jobs issues firsts
In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.