Saul Alinsky Quotes

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.

I don't believe there's two sides to every story. It's black and white. There's right and wrong.

I am black or white, I'll never be grey in my life.

I think the truth is black-and-white.

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

You either are or you're not.

For too long, actually, we have either said you're this or that.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.

Everything in our world tends to be built on either/ors, and either/ors inevitably make enemies.

We believed it was a Good vs Evil situation: that the WBC was right and everybody else was wrong, so there was no questioning. It was a very public war we were waging against the 'sinners.'

A mark of stupidity is a belief that one party is totally virtuous and correct on the issues while the other is evil and always wrong.

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

I never sit on a fence. I am either on one side or another.

There’s only truth and not truth. You’re either very good or evil.

So over violent, or over civil that every man with him was God or Devil.

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.

Nothing helps you sleep at night so much as being absolutely certain that you're right, and everyone else is evil.

I turned my back on the devil, turned my back on the angel too.

The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these two great armies, there was no such thing. Good was good, and evil was evil, and they shared no common ground.