Saul Alinsky Quotes

I was an ordinary boy at school, a young man. In fact, what did the headmaster once say? "You're constantly challenging those in authority; questioning and challenging those in authority." Which was not really the way I saw it. I felt there were questions that had to be answered, and things that weren't quite right.

Everyone's got skeletons in their closet, and I've got a million in mine, believe me. I tested the envelope; I pushed it. Whenever somebody in authority told me not to do something, I did it just to find out why they said not to do it.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

I'm a total nonconformist; for me, it's about going down rabbit holes.

Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.

I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?

I rarely accept things on blind faith, especially the orthodoxy of any given practice, or any given practicum. I'm like, "Oh come on. Is this the way to do things?"

In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey orders!

I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

Banned! My eyes light up, I think I see stars. Anything that has been banned by anyone must be something I’d like.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.

Let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid down with ought with because with every brain which thinks it thinks, nor dares to feel.

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.