Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.
Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.
One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.
The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
I've never joined any organization - not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much.
We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.
Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.
True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'
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.
In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
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.
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community.
The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.
A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
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.
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.
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.
It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral.
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.
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.
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
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.
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.
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.
People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.
Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclearpowered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
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.
First rule of change is controversy. You can't get away from it for the simple reason all issues are controversial. Change means movement, and movement means friction, and friction means heat, and heat means controversy.
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.
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.
The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.
Do one of three things. One, go 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.
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.
The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me.' (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.