136 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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