Top 100 Saul D. Alinsky Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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 D. Alinsky

2. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

3. “Change comes from power, and power comes from organization.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

4. “Control healthcare and you control the people.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

5. “True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

6. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

7. “Power goes to two poles-to those who’ve got the money and those who’ve got the people.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

8. “Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

9. “Change means movement. Movement means friction.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

10. “Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

11. “The very 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 D. Alinsky

12. “If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

13. “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.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

14. “Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

15. “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

16. “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.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

17. “The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means...”

— Saul D. Alinsky

18. “The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

19. “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

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

— Saul D. Alinsky

21. “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.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

22. “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

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

— Saul D. Alinsky

24. “The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

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

— Saul D. Alinsky

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

26. “The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

27. “The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

28. “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.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

29. “The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

30. “Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

31. “The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

32. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

33. “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.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

34. “The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

35. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

36. “The fourth rule is: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

37. “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

38. “Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

39. “The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

40. “Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

41. “Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing – but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

42. “Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

43. “From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

44. “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.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

45. “It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

46. “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

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

— Saul D. Alinsky

48. “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 D. Alinsky

49. “The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at.”

— Saul D. Alinsky

50. “You cannot meet today’s crisis tomorrow.”

— Saul D. Alinsky