Saul Alinsky Quotes

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

No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Last guys don't finish nice.

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

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

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.

You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.