Saul Alinsky Quotes

You get few chances to make really transformational institutional change.

Once I learned about grassroots organizing, I got so enamored with it because I thought 'Wow this is the way you do it!'

I was very fortunate to have known Fred Ross Sr., who was organizing the Community Service Organization (CSO) way back in the late 50's and early 60's. I was able to work with him.

Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.

Either we stay at home and become pillars of the community or we go out and tour. We couldn't really find any communities that still needed pillars.

The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

We in Europe need to discuss how we can improve the community. That is the correct order.

I've seen young people raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix a problem in their community. I've seen young people raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to dig wells in Africa. I've seen young people pass laws, largely impacting their communities. They do have the power to change the world.

Being a philanthropist doesn't mean necessarily writing a huge check. It can mean mobilizing your community to start asking questions.

The organizers first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.

We want to make nation-building a people's movement.

We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

I had too many businesses that are frivolous. I have enough. What interests me most is under-served communities. We need a new style of empowering these people, and new approaches.

We mustn't assume that we are going to deinvent government solely from inside the Beltway or within one or two sessions of Congress. We will do it one step at a time, in one community at a time - at the local level and through local institutions like churches, nonprofit and volunteer organizations and families.

If everyone is a changemaker, there's no way a problem can outrun a solution

Human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.

I'm so moved when I see everyday Americans standing together, against all odds, to make their lives and communities better - whether it's organizing against big factories polluting their air or against big banks corrupting our economy and political system.

I think it's terribly important that networks of anarchists establish themselves with a view toward educating people.

We should learn ... to do our best for the sake of our communities and for the sake of those for whom we pave the way.

The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future.

A movement with some lasting organization is a lot less dramatic than a movement with a lot of demonstrations and a lot of marching and so forth. The more dramatic organization does catch attention quicker. Over the long haul, however, it's a lot more difficult to keep together because you're not building solid...A lasting organization is one in which people will continue to build, develop and move when you are not there.

Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.

In a volunteer organization there has to be time for community.