American community organizer (1909-1972)
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
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
Reveille for Radicals
You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
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
Reveille for Radicals
It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
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
Rules for Radicals
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
Reveille for Radicals
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
Rules for Radicals
Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals