On community organizing

• A People's Organization is a conflict group, [and] this must be openly and fully recognized. Its sole reason in coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness. A People’s Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life. . . .

• A People's Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. It is a war against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair, and unhappiness. They are basically the same issues for which nations have gone to war in almost every generation. . . . War is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play. . . .

• A People's Organization lives in a world of hard reality. It lives in the midst of smashing forces, dashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, seeming chaos, the hot and the cold, the squalor and the drama, which people prosaically refer to as life and students describe as 'society'. [From Alinsky's 1946 book, "Reveille for Radicals]

From a 1972 interview with Saul Alinsky in Playboy magazine:

ALINSKY: ... if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They're my kind of people.

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From another tireless community organizer:

"I'll never forget this training began on the streets of Chicago doing what so many of you have done. 
Organizing and working to make people's lives just a little bit better. 
I know how hard it is.
It comes with little sleep, little pay, and alot of sacrifice.
There are days of disappointment.
But sometimes, just sometimes, there are nights like this.
A night that years from now when we've made the changes we believe in...
when more families can afford to see a doctor...
when the world sees America differently...
You'll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began.
This was the moment.
Years from now, you'll look back when America began to know what it means to hope." [Barack Obama, community organizer]

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Pontius Pilate was a governor. Jesus was a community organizer. (Seen on a T-shirt)