Organizers Quotes

“So many people think that they are not gifted because they don’t have an obvious talent that people can recognize because it doesn’t fall under the creative arts category—writing, dancing, music, acting, art or singing. Sadly, they let their real talents go undeveloped, while they chase after fame. I am grateful for the people with obscure unremarked talents because they make our lives easier---inventors, organizers, planners, peacemakers, communicators, activists, scientists, and so forth. However, there is one gift that trumps all other talents—being an excellent parent. If you can successfully raise a child in this day in age to have integrity then you have left a legacy that future generations will benefit from.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“There is an old saying that every story, even your own, is either happy or sad depending on where you stop telling it. I believe I'll stop telling this one here.”
― Wiley Cash, The Last Ballad

“La mort est le seul rendez-vous qui ne soit pas noté dans votre organizer.”
― Frédéric Beigbeder, 99 francs

“The current system expects activists, organizers and abolitionists to do it 100% perfect right now with limited resources. While the flawed racist system has been doing it imperfectly for hundreds of years while exploiting us and our resources. Things I think about...

(7/2/2020 on Twitter)”
― Nikkita Oliver

“An organizer for a free society must be a creative person; his search for universals means the fulfillment of the highest goals of a creative mind--the finding of similarities in seemingly different or dissimilar things in our world. It is only in the discovery of these similarities that we have hope for even dimly understanding what we call life. Only with these similarities can we begin to construct natural laws of politics and detect an order in much of the chaos and carnage about us.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing people so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead to realize those values of equality, justice, freedom, the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judeo-Christianity and democratic tradition. Democracy is not an end but the best means toward achieving these values. These values are not even debatable in a free society; they are accepted, they are the reasons for the democratic society.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Paradoxically the roots of the radical's irreverence toward his present society lie in his reverence for the values and promises of the democratic faith, of the free and open society. He is angry with and hates those parts of the body politic that have broken faith with the future, with the dreams and hopes of a free way of life.

His is a quest for a future: where everyone would have a job, a real job--more than just a paycheck--a job that would be meaningful to society as well as to the worker; a future where everyone would have full opportunities to achieve his potentiality; where education, good housing, health, and full equality for all would be universal; a promised land of peace and plenty; a world where all the revolutionary slogans of the past would come to life: "Love your neighbor as you would love yourself"; "You are your brother's keeper"; "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality"; "All men are created equal"; "Peace and bread"; "For the general welfare"; a world where the Judeo-Christian values and the promise of the American Constitution would be made real.

Each victory will bring a new vision of human happiness, for man's highest end is to create--total fulfillment, total security, would dull the creative drive. Ours is really the quest for uncertainty, for that continuing change which is life. The pursuit of happiness is never ending--the happiness lies in the pursuit.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“There should not be too much concern with specifics or details of a people’s program. The program items are not too significant when one considers the enormous importance of getting people interested and participating in a democratic way. After all, the real democratic program is a democratically minded people--a healthy, active, participating, interested, self-confident people who, through their participation and interest, become informed, educated, and above all develop faith in themselves, their fellow men, and the future. The people themselves are the future. The people themselves will solve each problem that will arise out of a changing world. They will if they, the people, have the opportunity and power to make and enforce the decision instead of seeing that power vested in just a few. No clique, or caste, power group or benevolent administration can have the people’s interest at heart as much as the people themselves.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Those who have devoted themselves to the building of People’s Organization have become more and more convinced that one of the most significant educational approaches is not through argument, through lectures, through logic, or any other conventional common practices but through rationalization. These organizers feel, on the basis of their experiences not only in People’s Organizations but in their own general life, that most people in a great many instances act first and think afterward of the reasons why they acted. It seems as though a good part of our knowledge and what we may refer to as our own philosophy and attitudes are not things that we carefully and laboriously think through but are the rationalizations or self-justifications of acts we have already committed.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“In a People’s Organization popular education is an exciting and dramatic process. Education instead of being distant and academic becomes a direct and intimate part of the personal lives, experiences, and activities of the people. Committee members find that they must become informed about the field of activities of their committee; they later discover that in order to be capable of carrying out their own activities they must know about all those other problems and activities that are related to the committee’s work. The committee that becomes interested in housing shortly finds itself involved in the fields of planning, health, race relations, and many other fields. Knowledge then becomes an arsenal of weapons in the battle against injustice and degradation. It is no longer learning for learning’s sake, but learning for a real reason, a purpose. It ceases to be a luxury or something known under the vague, refined name of culture and becomes as essential as money in the bank, good health, good housing, or regular employment.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The building of People’s Organizations is the creation of a set of realignments, new definitions of values and objectives, the breaking down of prejudices and barriers and all of the many other changes which flow out of a People’s Organization. The actual development of these social forces, coupled with the popular education, participation, and reorientation which is part of this whole process, inevitably means significant changes in the attitudes, the philosophies, and the programs of the constituent community agencies as well as the local people.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The American dream was wrought in the fire of the passionate hearts and minds of America’s radicals. It could never have been conceived in the cold, clammy tomb of conservativism. The American radical descends from those who begot, nurtured, fought, and suffered for every idea that moved men’s feet forward in the march of civilization — the radicals of the world. The hopes and aspirations of the radicals of the world found fruit in the American Revolution. Here in the New World man would find the new life, the new order; even our money carried this message, NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM.

The history of America is the story of America’s radicals. It is a saga of revolution, battle, words on paper setting hearts on fire, ferment and turmoil; it is the story of every rallying cry of the American people. It is the story of the American Revolution, of the public schools, of the battle for free land, of emancipation, of the unceasing struggle for the ever increasing liberation of mankind.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“It is the most invincible army known to mankind — the people on the march. To the people ultimate triumph may be delayed but it cannot be denied.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“It is in an all-inclusive People’s Organization that people fight and think as people, as Americans, and not as businessmen, workers, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, whites, or colored. A People’s Organization inevitably smashes all artificial barriers, sectarian interests, religious, nationality, and racial distinctions. It is made up of people, its program is a people’s program, and they think together, work together, fight together, hope together, achieve together, as people.

The issue to be resolved is the creation of a world for the little people, a world where the millions instead of the few can live in dignity, peace, and security.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Those who fear the building of People’s Organizations as a revolution also forget that it is an orderly development of participation, interest, and action on the part of the masses of people. It may be true that it is revolution, but it is orderly revolution. To reject orderly revolution is to be hemmed in by two hellish alternatives: disorderly, sudden, stormy, bloody revolution, or a further deterioration of the mass foundation of democracy to the point of inevitable dictatorship. The building of People’s Organizations is orderly revolution; it is the process of the people gradually but irrevocably taking their places as citizens of a democracy.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The failure of the institutions of the people to solve basic issues is the result not only of their jealous isolation from one another but of the same mental isolationist policy concerning their objectives. They have forgotten that there is no such thing as a single problem, that all problems are interrelated, that all issues are part of a chain of human issues, and that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“This, then, is the job ahead. It is the job of building broad, deep People’s Organizations which are all-inclusive of both the people and their many organizations. It is the job of uniting, through a common interest which far transcends individual differences, all the institutions and agencies representative of the people. It is the job of building a People's Organization so that people will have faith in themselves and in their fellow men. It is the job of educating our people so that they will be informed to the point of being able to exercise an intelligent critical choice as to what is true and what is false. It is the job of instilling confidence in men so that they are sure they can destroy all of the evils which afflict them and their fellows, whether unemployment, war, or other man-made disasters. It is the greatest job man could have — the actual opportunity of creating and building a world of decency, dignity, peace, security, happiness; a world worthy of man and worthy of the name of civilization. This is the job ahead.

The building of these People's Organizations and the achievement of popular participation cannot and will not be done by denouncing the present deplorable condition of democracy. It will not be done by wailing self-recriminations. It can be done only by setting ourselves to the dirty, monotonous, heart-breaking job of building People’s Organizations. It can be done only by possessing the infinite patience and faith to hang on as parts of the organization disintegrate; to rebuild, add on, and continue to build.

It can be done only by those who believe in, have faith in, and are willing to make every sacrifice for the people. Those who see fearlessly and clearly; they will be your radicals. The radical will look squarely at all issues. He will not be so weighted down with material or malignant prejudice that he can only look upward with a worm’s-eye view. He will not look down upon mankind with the distorted, unrealistic, ivory-tower bird’s-eye view, but will look straight ahead on the dead level, seeing man as a man. Not from a long distance, up or down, but as a man living among men.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The tragedy of the young generation's "radicals" is that they dogmatically refuse to begin with the world as it is. But the only world we have is the world as it is, and we have to begin with that.

Any social changer, throughout history, has always known that you begin from where you are. Change can only be effected through power, and power means organization. Organization can be built only around issues which are specific, immediate, and realizable.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Politically we feel alienated, rejected, and hopeless. The chasm between the people and their political representatives has widened to a terrifying degree. In a political vacuum we become increasingly vulnerable to a seizure from the far right. We know that the Snake is there but we are as paralyzed as the Rabbit. People are not rabbits, and America must shake off this nightmare and awake again. The middle classes must be organized for action, for claiming their rights and powers of citizenship in a free society. The organization must be committed to the values of a free and open society. The middle classes must begin to participate as citizens for those ideals which give meaning and purpose to life.

Logic and faith go together as the opposite sides of the same shield. We know by our intelligence the greatness and desirability of a free and open society over all other alternatives. Logic tells us, "We'll believe it when we see it." But there is also the converse, faith. Faith, or belief in the people, tells us, "We'll see it when we believe it."”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals