Saul Alinsky Quotes
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.
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Random House, 1971, p. 59.
As the Majority Leader of the House, Eric Cantor had to resolve conflicts and for coalitions that will compromise to get anything done. However, the Tea Party movement didn’t want any compromises even if it meant shutting down the government and defaulting on the national debt. They ran against conservative Republicans in the Republican primary elections campaigning that the incumbent made and facilitated compromises with Democrats. In some districts like Eric Cantor’s there were enough primary voters who agreed. Terry was explaining the message that the other conservative politicians received.
Referring to community participation and consultation on urban development:
She saw strikes as wasteful where the workers and the companies, the public and the government lost. She favored arbitration which was generally opposed by labor and management and still is today in most cases.
Saul David Alinsky was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) Alinsky defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice.
