Saul Alinsky
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Attitude
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Failure
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.Collection: Change
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. That means working in the system.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Communication
I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.Collection: Independence
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.Collection: Politics
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
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.
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.
If the ends don't justify the means, what does?
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
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.
The first step in community organization is community disorganization.
The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded.
'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.
We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.
No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
My only fixed truth is a belief in people: a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions.
History is a relay of revolutions.
Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.
Last guys don't finish nice.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'
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.'
All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.
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. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events.
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.Collection: Peace
Never let a crisis go to wasteCollection: Waste
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.Collection: Jobs
True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.Collection: Cutting
Control healthcare and you control the peopleCollection: People
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)Collection: Hurt
A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Change
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.Collection: Men
In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.Collection: Jobs
The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Angel