Alinsky Quotes & Sayings

The fourth rule is: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity. — Saul Alinsky

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 chance the future. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

Last guys don't finish nice. — Saul D. Alinsky

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree. — Saul Alinsky

She [Hillary Clinton] is the epitome of the progressive - the secular progressive movement. And she counts on the fact that people are uninformed, the Alinsky Model, taking advantage of useful idiots. — Benjamin Carson

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. — Saul Alinsky

In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt. — Saul Alinsky

The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth. — Saul Alinsky

History is made up of "moral" judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin's acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. — Saul D. Alinsky

The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead. — Saul Alinsky

In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property. — Saul D. Alinsky

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat. — Saul Alinsky

People always do the right thing for the wrong reason. — Saul D. Alinsky

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. — 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. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and motivations of Saul Alinsky," writes Saul. "I answered two of them incorrectly. — Nicholas Von Hoffman

A bit of a blurred vision of a better world. Much of an organizer's daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. It is as though as an artist he is painting a tiny leaf. It is inevitable that sooner or later he will react with "What am I doing spending my whole life just painting one little leaf? The hell with it, I quit." What keeps him going is a blurred vision of a great mural where other artists - organizers - are painting their bits, and each piece is essential to the total. — Saul D. Alinsky

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 heat means controversy. — Saul Alinsky

Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party. — Bill Dedman

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue. — Saul Alinsky

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions. — Saul Alinsky

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 walk in there eating a ham sandwich unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out. — Saul Alinsky

Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom. — Saul Alinsky

The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

If most of the people in the country believe that America is generally fair and decent, it becomes more difficult for Saul Alinsky types to recruit change agents and for those on the Far Left to undermine our Constitution. Hence the constant bad-mouthing of our nation to impressionable young people, preparing them to be ripe for manipulation at the appropriate time. — Ben Carson

The first step in community organization is community disorganization. — Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky advised his followers to level sharp attacks against their opponents with the goal of goading them into rash counterattacks that would then discredit them. To avoid falling into this trap, those of us who are interested in civil discussion should prepare ourselves to refrain from reacting in fear or anger to those who disagree with us or even attack us. — Ben Carson

'The Prince' was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. 'Rules for Radicals' is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. — Saul Alinsky

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. — Saul Alinsky

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; — Saul D. Alinsky

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. — Saul Alinsky

You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow. — Saul Alinsky

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. 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. — Saul D. Alinsky

Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority. — Saul Alinsky

The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. — Saul Alinsky

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. — Saul Alinsky

Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough. — Saul D. Alinsky

Never let a crisis go to waste — Saul Alinsky

The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, pointed out the variations in ethical definitions by virtue of where you stand. Mendoza said to Tanner, "I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich." Tanner replied, "I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands." The — Saul D. Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

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 - or which is which), 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. — Saul D. Alinsky

The tactics of Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama are geared toward wealth redistribution. — Monica Crowley

Obama's Marxist mentors - Franklin Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers - also understood that you don't build an army of street organizers or a recurring voting constituency by teaching people of the streets to fish. When you 'share wealth around' you make the distributees dependent on your next handout - beholden to your largesse with other's people's money and personally worse off in every respect. — David Limbaugh

The people of America are red, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. Their eyes are blue, black, and brown, and all the shades in between. Their hair is straight, curly, kinky, and most of it in between. They are tall and short, slim and fat, athletic and anaemic, and most of them in between. They are the different peoples of the world becoming more and more the "in between." They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new mankind
a people of the world. Their face is the face of the future. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them. — Saul D. Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

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. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons?afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. 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; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it. — Saul Alinsky

You regard yourself as tolerant, and in that one adjective you most fittingly describe yourself. You really don't like people you tolerate them. You are very tolerant, MR. BUT. — Saul D. Alinsky

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. — Saul Alinsky

America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society. — Saul Alinsky

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem. — Saul D. Alinsky

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. — Saul Alinsky

Let the liberal turn to the course of action, the course of all radicals, and the amused look vanishes from the face of society as it snarls, "That's radical!" Society has good reason to fear the radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives. — Saul D. Alinsky

Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts. — Saul Alinsky

The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories. They have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the past and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals. — Saul Alinsky

Do you like people? Most people claim that they like people with, of course, a "few exceptions." When the exceptions are added together it becomes clear that they include a vast majority of the people. It becomes equally clear that most people like just a few people, their kind of people, and either do not actively care for or actively dislike most of the "other" people. — Saul Alinsky

Life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known. — Saul Alinsky

The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions. — Saul D. Alinsky

Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. — Saul Alinsky

People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people. — Saul Alinsky

To the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation ... If you start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, you're 30 percent ahead. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

Organized business has assumed that greater profits would be pretty much of a cure-all, and it has to a major extent ignored the fact that the welfare of business rests upon the welfare of the consumers of a nation; that business or free enterprise will function in a democracy only so long as the democracy functions. — Saul Alinsky

I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism ... The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. — Saul Alinsky

for Alinsky, democratic politics is basically a mechanism of legal extortion, justified by appeals to justice and equality. A — Dinesh D'Souza

Obama wouldn't have been voted president if he weren't black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot of money have a lot of money, because she's black. It was Oprah. No, it can't be. Yes, it is. There's a lot of guilt out there, show we're not racists, we'll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth ... If Obama weren't black he'd be a tour guide in Honolulu or he'd be teaching Saul Alinsky constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago. — Rush Limbaugh

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

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. — Saul D. Alinsky

Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community. — Saul Alinsky

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. — Saul Alinsky

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 ... — Saul Alinsky

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest. — Saul D. Alinsky

Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores. — Saul Alinsky

Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance, creating a mass ego. CONFLICT — Saul D. Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations. It is one of the classic American fairy tales. From — Saul D. Alinsky

Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day, and 8,000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, 'Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al.' — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. — Saul Alinsky

The men who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends... are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land. — Saul D. Alinsky

Do one of three things.One,go 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 delegatepos — Saul D. Alinsky

The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded. — Saul Alinsky

The life of man upon earth is a warfare ... - JOB 7:1 — Saul D. Alinsky

The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins — Saul Alinsky

Do not let the Obama administration fool you with all their cunning Alinsky methods. And if you don't know what that method is, I implore you to get the book 'Rules for Radicals,' by Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama is very well trained in these methods. — Jon Voight

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. — Saul Alinsky

True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within. — Saul Alinsky

A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises. — Saul Alinsky

Though some student activists of the 1960s may have idolized Alinsky, he didn't particularly idolize them. — Bill Dedman

For Hillary, gangsterism is not merely a matter of means; it is also her end. Hillary wants to be the crime boss of America. That is the only way to satisfy her unquenchable desire for money, power, and social control. As we will see in this book, Hillary is a criminal who found the criminal practices of Saul Alinsky to be too weak-kneed for her taste, and Alinsky was a gangster who found the criminal practices of the Al Capone gang to be a tad sentimental. In short, Hillary is the true Democrat, the gangster par excellence. I suspect this is why the Democratic establishment lined up so quickly behind her. While the Republicans had a real primary, hotly contested, the Democrats had a primary in which Bernie seemed to win again and again but never seemed to make a dent in Hillary's lead. That's because the Democratic super-delegates were uniformly in her camp, even though there was throughout the campaign the risk that she would be indicted. — Dinesh D'Souza

Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith ... Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith. — Saul D. Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

Power goes to two poles-to those who've got the money and those who've got the people. — Saul Alinsky

The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. — Saul Alinsky