Great Throughts Treasury

"There is no such thing as a single problem… all problems are interrelated."

"Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict."

"Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically - to promote a cause you believe in."

"A bit of a blurred vision of a better world. Much of an organizer?s daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. It is as though as an artist he is painting a tiny leaf. It is inevitable that sooner or later he will react with What am I doing spending my whole life just painting one little leaf? The hell with it, I quit. What keeps him going is a blurred vision of a great mural where other artists?organizers?are painting their bits, and each piece is essential to the total."

"A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism."

"A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises."

"A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family."

"A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution"

"A word about my personal philosophy. It is anchored in optimism. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism, there is no reason to carry on. If we think of the struggle as a climb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finally reach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the real top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we've reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably."

"A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

"A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don?t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won?t act for change, but won?t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution."

"An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent... He must create a mechanism that can drain off the underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time. Out of this mechanism, a new community organization arises... The job then is getting the people to move, to act, to participate; in short, to develop and harness the necessary power to effectively conflict with the prevailing patterns and change them. When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an 'agitator' they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function?to agitate to the point of conflict."

"Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people?The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat? The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules? The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man?s most potent weapon? The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy? The seventh rule : is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag? The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on? The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than : the thing itself? The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition? The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside? The twelth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative? The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

"All life is warfare, and it's the continuing fight against the status quo that revitalizes society, stimulates new values and gives man renewed hope of eventual progress. The struggle itself is the victory."

"Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."

"All effective action requires the passport of morality."

"Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical."

"And so the guided questioning goes on without anyone losing face or being left out of the decision-making. Every weakness of every proposed tactic is probed by questions.... Is this manipulation? Certainly."

"An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth -- truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations."

"As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system."

"Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward."

"Beginning on the day in 1975 when his guerrilla army marched silently into the capital, Phnom Penh, Pol Pot emptied the cities, pulled families apart, abolished religion and closed schools. Everyone was ordered to work, even children. The Khmer Rouge outlawed money and closed all markets. Doctors were killed, as were most people with skills and education that threatened the regime."

"Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea."

"But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: ?Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing ? but this only swings : people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.?"

"Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together."

"But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you?re 30 per cent ahead."

"Conflict with other groups contributes to the establishment and reaffirmation of the group and maintains its boundaries against the surrounding social world."

"Conversely, if you have a good relationship, he is very receptive.... For example, I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual. If, in my early days when I organized... neighborhood in Chicago, which was 95 per cent Roman Catholic, I had tried to communicate this, even though the experience of the residents, whose economic plight was aggravated by large families, that would have been the end of my relationship with the community. That instant I would have been stamped as an enemy of the church and all communication would have ceased."

"Change means movement, movement means friction, friction means heat, and heat means controversy."

"Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest."

"Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing-but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegate?"

"Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death."

"Do you like people? Most people claim that they like people with, of course, a "few exceptions." When the exceptions are added together it becomes clear that they include a vast majority of the people. It becomes equally clear that most people like just a few people, their kind of people, and either do not actively care for or actively dislike most of the "other" people."

"From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams... only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues... Until he has those means and power instruments, his 'tactics' are very different from power tactics. Therefore, every move revolves around one central point: how many recruits will this bring into the organization, whether by means of local organizations, churches, service groups, labor Unions, corner gangs, or as individuals."

"Eight months after securing independence (from the British), the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them."

"Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear the most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution."

"He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone's number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the mob because of Al's income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti's boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob's operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out."

"Here I propose to present an arrangement of certain facts and general concepts of change, a step toward a science of revolution."

"For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people?s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place."

"History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along the way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of the prevailing status quo."

"History is made up of moral judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin's acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values."

"Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular."

"I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back."

"I tell people the hell with charity, the only thing you'll get is what you're strong enough to get."

"If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them."

"I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music would be relatively quiet. The hundred blacks who would be given tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; them the people would go to the symphony hall--with obvious consequences."

"In mass organization, you can't go outside people's actual experience. I've been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their Church, even its physical property."

"In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt."

"If the organizer begins with an affirmation of love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him."

"In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems."