100+ Saul Alinsky Quotes On Communism, Socialism And Politics

Saul Alinsky was an American activist and community organizer who focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities in Chicago and other cities in the United States. He was the founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and wrote the book "Rules for Radicals," which has been used by generations of activists and politicians. Alinsky's strategies for social change, which emphasize grassroots organizing, remain influential today. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Saul Alinsky on communism, socialism, politics.

Top 10 Saul Alinsky Quotes

1. 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.
2. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
3. 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.
4. Control healthcare and you control the people
5. The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
6. History is a relay of revolutions.
7. In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.

Saul Alinsky Short Quotes

• Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.
• A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
• The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
• The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.
• Change means movement. Movement means friction.
• A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
• The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.
• No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
• Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
• Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.

Saul Alinsky Quotes About Politics

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.) — Saul Alinsky

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 Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky Quotes About Love

The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space. — 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 Alinsky

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 Alinsky

Saul Alinsky Quotes About Organize

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 thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — Saul Alinsky

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

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. — Saul Alinsky

Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy. — Saul Alinsky

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

Saul Alinsky Quotes About Life

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

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. — Saul 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

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. — Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky Quotes About World

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

The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. — Saul Alinsky

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

Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers. — Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky Quotes About Enemy

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

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

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

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

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

Last guys don't finish nice. — Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 Alinsky

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. — Saul Alinsky

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

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

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. — Saul Alinsky

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

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. — 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

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. — 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

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

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

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. — Saul Alinsky

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

The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. — 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

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. — 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

Quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara... are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport. — Saul Alinsky

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

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. — 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

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

It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy . . . on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible. — 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

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. — Saul Alinsky

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

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

The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results. — Saul Alinsky

A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution — 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 Alinsky

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

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

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

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. — Saul Alinsky

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

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. — 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

Never do for someone what they can do for themselves. — Saul Alinsky

Never let a crisis go to waste — Saul Alinsky

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

The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself. — 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

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

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion. — 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 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

Life Lessons by Saul Alinsky

1. Saul Alinsky taught the importance of organizing and mobilizing people to create social change. He believed in the power of grassroots movements and encouraged people to take action in their communities to create lasting change.
2. He also taught the importance of understanding the power dynamics of a situation and using them to your advantage to create change.
3. Finally, Alinsky taught the importance of being persistent and never giving up in the face of adversity, as change can take a long time to come about.