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Saul Alinsky Biography

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his book Rules for Radicals (1971).

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Saul Alinsky Quotes

If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.

Negative, Enough, Rules For Radicals, Push

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

Ethics, Inversely, Issues, Mean, Ones

Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Enemy, Power, Remember, Rule, Thinking, Thinks

One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.

Angel, Angels, Devil, Devils, Side, Sides

Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.

Accept, Acceptance, Accepting, Death, Sudden

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.

Fear, Human, Love Is, Mean, Power, Respect

Last guys don't finish nice.

Enemy, Finish, Guy, Guys, Nice

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.

Acknowledgment, Kingdoms, Know, Legends, Men, Radical

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Advantage, Impossible, Men, Potent, Weapons

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.

Alive, Democracy, Dictatorship, Life, Living

Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.

Asking, Diarrhea, Problem, Sociologist

Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.

Death, Grief, Believe, Except, Cause

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.

Fantasy, Judgment, Rooted, Standards, World

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

Mean, Rules For Radicals, Unethical, Use

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.

Long, Democracy, Would Be, Rests, Function, Nation

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

Compromise, Compromises, Ongoing, Periodically, Society

Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

Actions, Different, Events, Period, Purpose

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.

America, Bourgeois, Rebels, Right, War, White

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.

Capitalist Economy, Identity, Kind, Labor, Premise, Today

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.

Civilization, Materialistically, Moral, People, Religion

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Saul Alinsky Biography

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