John Ralston Saul Quotes
Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other's errors ... Only a sailor can set them straight.
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
The void in our society has been produced by the absence of values... we have no widespread belief in the value of participation. The rational system has made us fear standing out in any serious way.
The recession is over." This phrase has been used twice a year since 1973 by government leaders throughout the West. Its meaning is unclear. See: Depression.
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.
Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate.
If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.
People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
I have a theory of statistics: if you can double them or halve them and they still work, they are really good statistics.
There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting.
Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.
Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.
Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.
Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created
An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.
The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.
As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.
The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.
Happy Hour: a depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature.
Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If asked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands.
Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.
Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.
Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection. (V - From Ideology Towards Equilibrium)
Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship.
In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
If the technocratic class often invokes technology, it is because these inanimate objects can take on a trajectory of their own and so cover for the manager's inability to give leadership.
There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.
Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.
Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.
It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.
In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.