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.
Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
America's corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.
Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization.
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.
Control healthcare and you control the people.
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.
Dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.
If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.
If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons- afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification.
In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of 'the common good' and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed.
It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You're just not there.
It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.
It is not a world of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies are always immoral; a world where 'reconciliation' means that when one side gets the power, the other side gets reconciled to it...
Last guys don't finish nice.
Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.
Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
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.
Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.
One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
Organized business has assumed that greater profits would be pretty much of a cure-all, and it has to a major extent ignored the fact that the welfare of business rests upon the welfare of the consumers of a nation; that business or free enterprise will function in a democracy only so long as the democracy functions.
Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.
Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.
Power goes to two poles-to those who've got the money and those who've got the people.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me.' (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
The cry of the Have-Nots has never been 'give us our hearts,' but always 'get off our backs;' they ask not for love but for breathing space.
The end is what you want and the means is how you get it.
The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
The establishment can accept being screwed, but not being laughed at.
The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results.
The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
The only nonpartisan people are those who are dead.
The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.
The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.
Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.
True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.
You cannot meet today's crisis tomorrow.
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