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.
This is the world as it is. This is where you start.
Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom?
Never let a crisis go to waste.
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.
True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
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.
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.
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 most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
In the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems.
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at.
If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them.
Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.
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.
In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.
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.