Saul Alinsky Quotes

One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.

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.

You are either with us or against us…

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

False dichotomies are often at the heart of discord.

Any time the country is split 50/50, the leader is wrong.

When the Tea Party comes to town, compromise goes out the door.

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.

In this country there are two parties: the righteous and the fallacious

… when the one side says black and the other white, when the opposite political characters are treated by their respective antagonists as rogues, fools, blockheads, wretches, and all the other names in which the English political dictionary is so very rich, one stands like the ass, between two bundles of hay, considerably embarrassed which ought to be chosen....

There shall be no neutrals. Men shall either like or dislike me.

The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.

Can we really mobilize support, even of friends, when we tell them that if you are not with us you are against us?

Partisanship has gotten worse and worse.

Hatred, anger, and violence can destroy us: the politics of polarization is dangerous.

My feeling is that the most dangerous people are always those who take a hardline position - and nothing inspires that sort of extremism like difference.

People are so quick to demonize and stereotype those on the other side that they often say that it's impossible to work with people on the other side.

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.

That's how hatred is created: two different groups, each insisting they're on the moral high ground

A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Either you're a hater or a lover.