Saul Alinsky
Saul David Alinsky was an American community organizer, activist, and writer who worked as a sociologist, trade unionist, civil rights advocate, and social reformer during the twentieth century.
Born in Chicago on January 30, 1909, Alinsky received his education at the University of Chicago. He went on to pursue multiple overlapping roles throughout his career in the United States, working as a community organizer, a human rights defender, and a civil rights advocate. His activities as a trade unionist further extended the range of his engagement with social and political causes.
As a social reformer and activist, Alinsky operated across the intersecting fields of labor, civil rights, and community organization. His identity as both a sociologist and a practitioner placed him within a tradition of American social reform that addressed questions of rights and representation. These combined commitments defined his public life from his Chicago origins through his decades of work as a citizen of the United States.
Alinsky is notable for the work Rules for Radicals, which stands as the primary text associated with his name. He died on June 12, 1972, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, at the age of sixty-three. His career encompassed the roles of writer, organizer, unionist, and advocate, and Rules for Radicals remains the work through which his name is most directly identified.
Quotes by Saul Alinsky
The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded.
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.
To the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation... If you start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, you're 30 percent ahead.
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.
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. In short, radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events.
Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day, and 8,000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, 'Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al.'
I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
