John Ralston Saul Quotes
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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.
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Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.
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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.
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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.
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Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.
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Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public.
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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.'
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Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.
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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.
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Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
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Because the managerial élites are now so large and have such a dominant effect on our educational system, we are actually teaching most people to manage, not to think. Not only do we not reward thought, we punish it as unprofessional.
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Happy family: The existence and maintenance of this is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.
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Three of Newt Gingrich's 'Five Principles of American Civilization' deal with business, technology, and organization - all characteristics of work. There is no mention of liberty or equality or, for that matter, of democracy.
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In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.
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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.
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United States: .... A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
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If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.
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Societies either roll on blindly to disaster or they find the inner strength to stop themselves long enough to find ways for reform from within.
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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.