“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.”
Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 126
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Saul D. Alinsky 28
American community organizer and writer 1909–1972Related quotes

This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.
Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 16, “Democracy in Action” (pp. 311-312)
It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

“Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Purity, Lineage and the Love Organ (of Life) http://www.unification.net/news/news20010218_2.html (2001-02-18)

31 January 2012 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/164480736064311296
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“You put your eyes in your pockets and your nose on the ground.”
Song lyrics, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Ballad of a Thin Man