John Ralston Saul Quotes
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Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
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Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate.
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The strength of representative democracy is its ability to slow down those in power who wish to govern by blank cheque, but also those not in power who wish to yank the state about on the sole basis of their self-interest.
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In the early 1980s, the government of New Zealand fell into the hands of true believers, globalist believers, and they embraced the theory of inevitability perhaps more completely than anybody else. And it solved in the very short term some of their debt problems, but in the medium- and long-term, it left them in real economic trouble.
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The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force.
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Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters aren't 'real' writers and, so, don't merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PEN's attention.
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A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.
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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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Content is an obstacle to the exercise of power.
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Some people don't like the 'comeback' because that suggests they went somewhere, which they didn't. That isn't what I mean. In my mind, people were doing well, and then they went right down, and they made a comeback. It's not that they went anywhere. It's that their fortunes went way down, and then they came back.
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It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.
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It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.
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Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.
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Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.
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You look around the world in 2013, and you say, 'How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison?' One or two. 'How many generals or bankers?' Two or three. 'But how many writers?' 850 or so.
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Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
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Our elite is primarily and increasingly managerial. A managerial elite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function.
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Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.
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Given our inability over the past two decades to deal with an unbreakable chain of unemployment, debt, inflation and no real growth, we have drifted farther and farther out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea. The new certitude of those in positions of authority - those out of the water - is that the certain answer is to cut away the life preservers.
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Faith: The opposite of dogmatism.
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The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.
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I don't use the word 'renaissance'. It's flawed because in Latin, it's tied to the rebirth of Christ... It's a word that's tied to a European concept.
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In the European tradition, rivers are seen as divisions between peoples. But in the Aboriginal tradition, rivers are seen as the glue, the highway, the linkage between people, not the separation. And that's the history of Canada: our rivers and lakes were our highways.
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All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.