John Ralston Saul Quotes
-
Traditionally in capitalism, when you have more cash, you can fund more activity, which produces more jobs and creates more wealth. That's basic economic theory.
-
Panic: A highly underrated capacity thanks to which individuals are able to indicate clearly that something is wrong.... Given their head, most humans panic with great dignity and imagination. This can be called democratic expression or practical common sense.
-
Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
-
For about 125 years, give or take, the Canadian government has acted extremely badly - even in a way which should be called evil - breaking treaties, breaking agreements.
-
Canada is the only country in the West that hasn't given in to the rhetoric of fear. The dominant rhetoric is a line of inclusion.
-
The ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop.
-
In Canada, there's a surprising worship of managerialism versus ownership and wealth creation. There's a real problem in this country with believing that management is the answer to our problems.
-
People who believe in freedom of expression have spent several centuries fighting against censorship, in whatever form. We have to be certain the 'Net' doesn't become the site for technological book burning.
-
Either God is alive, in which case he'll deal with us as he sees fit. Or he is dead, in which case he was never alive, it being unlikely that he died of old age.
-
I've been up in the Arctic Circle where they have hockey rinks that don't have any heating. So it's - 40 C outside, it's - 55 inside. Or there's a social centre but no budget for anybody to run any programs. Stuff we wouldn't accept in Winnipeg, but we let it go on and on and on.
-
There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.
-
The fighting back by indigenous people started in 1900: OK, they've cornered us. Our population is almost gone; they've defeated us. From there, the modern Indian rights movement started, and it was a very hard fight, with a lot of stuff going against them.
-
If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.
-
People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.
-
Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.
-
The state-initiated referendum has always been a part of this anti-democratic logic. Stop the talk, we're going to decide, yes or no. At this point the citizen's role is to wave one flag or the other and cheer for one side of the simple question or the other. In other words, we're reduced to children.
-
There are two fairly standard approaches to political power used by those who seek it. Some seek power with the assumption that the citizenry are the source of legitimacy and are to be treated with respect. Others concentrate on identifying whatever insecurities there are within the citizenry and on exploiting them.'
-
Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public.
-
Canada was built from its very beginnings on the belief that public leadership in the economy and on social issues would be as effective and cheap as anything done by the private sector.
-
Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.
-
In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.
-
You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real.
-
One of the things non-aboriginal Canadians learned from aboriginal people over the last 400 years is you don't have to be one thing. That's a European idea. There's multiple personalities, multiple loyalties. You can be a Winnipegger, a Manitoban, a Westerner.
-
Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.