Saul Alinsky Quotes - Page 5

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclearpowered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.

Last guys don't finish nice.

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. In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.

History is a relay of revolutions.

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.

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.

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

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

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 it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

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

The organized labor movement as it is constituted today is as much a concomitant of a capitalist economy as is capital. Organized labor is predicated upon the basic premise of collective bargaining between employers and employees. This premise can obtain only for an employer-employee type of society. If the labor movement is to maintain its own identity and security, it must of necessity protect that kind of society.