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
enemy reactions rules-for-radicals
The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
wall sorry home
Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing -- but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.
thinking power enemy
Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
mean creativity new-beginnings
Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
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.
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.
jobs expression organization
The organizers first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.
change mean movement
Change means movement. Movement means friction.
mean hands civilization
Radicals, on the other hand, want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful. They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not augur for an ever expanding democratic way of life.
passion men bridges
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 prevailing patterns of their lives agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.
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.
reality doe different
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....
fighting blow land
In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.
mean want ends
The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.