Rules for Radicals Quotes

“All of life is partisan. There is no dispassionate objectivity. The revolutionary ideology is not confined to a specific limited formula. It is a series of general principles, rooted in Lincoln’s May 19, 1856, statement: “Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“History is made up of "moral" judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin's acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict.”
― Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“Between the Haves and Have-Nots are the Have-a-Little, Want Mores--the middle class. Torn between upholding the status quo to protect the little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they become split personalities. They could be described as social, economic, and political schizoids. Generally, they seek the safe way, where they can profit by change and yet not risk losing the little they have. They insist on a minimum of three aces before playing a hand in the poker game of revolution. Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia. Today in Western society and particularly in the United States they comprise the majority of our population.”
― Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“The real action is in the enemy's reaction.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline or organization.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises—which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

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

“As Mark Twain once put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.”
― Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“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 D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted—a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are—a chance to strive for some sort of order.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“The great American dream that reached out to the stars has been lost to the stripes. We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. Afraid, we turn from the glorious adventure of the pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of an illusionary security in an ordered, stratified, striped society. Our way of life is symbolized to the world by the stripes of military force. At home we have made a mockery of being our brother’s keeper by being his jail keeper. When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

“There is a feeling of death hanging over the nation. Today”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“We are not here concerned with people who profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions. Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to remain children and be cared for by others. Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“Why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings? Why yield even a single step … to the Tartuffery of words? For us psychologists that would involve a Tartuffery of action … For a psychologist today shows his good taste (others may say his integrity) in this, if in anything, that he resists the shamefully moralized manner of speaking which makes all modern judgments about men and things slimy. We”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“The function of an organizer is to raise questions that agitate, that break through the accepted pattern.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance, creating a mass ego. CONFLICT”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“The myth of altruism as a motivating factor in our behavior could arise and survive only in a society bundled in the sterile gauze of New England puritanism and Protestant morality and tied together with the ribbons of Madison Avenue public relations. It is one of the classic American fairy tales. From”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“To pander to those who have no stomach for straight language, and insist upon bland, non controversial sauces, is a waste of time. They cannot on deliberately will not understand what we are discussing here.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, “Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?” Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. “Because it’s there.” Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys in a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of an illusory security and safety.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“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. I”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism. We”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership—in the past political leaders, ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to “the system” itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“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 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”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. The”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis—will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. But if one lacks the luxury of a choice and is possessed of only one means, then the ethical question will never arise; automatically the lone means becomes endowed with a moral spirit. Its defense lies in the cry, “What else could I do?” Inversely, the secure position in which one possesses the choice of a number of effective and powerful means is always accompanied by that ethical concern and serenity of conscience so admirably described by Mark Twain as “The calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces.” To”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

“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.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals