Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything. "

John Ralston Saul

Related Quotes:

" It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done. "

John Ralston Saul

" Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it, too, is dead. "

John Ralston Saul

" You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

Indigenous People

" Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public. "

John Ralston Saul

" Languages and cultures are disappearing at an enormously fast rate, and many of them are in Canada. These are extreme examples of removal of freedom of expression - to actually lose a language and the ability to express that culture. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death. "

John Ralston Saul

" A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. "

John Ralston Saul

" Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order. "

John Ralston Saul

" If you live in a democracy, it's very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high abstract generalisations which are, in fact, the most banal and naive cliches dug out of second-rate movements of the late 19th century. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy. "

John Ralston Saul

" The merger mania which goes on and on and on is the sign of the disappearance of competition. As we deregulate, the mergers increase, which means there's less and less competition. At the national level, at the regional level, but also at the international level. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" What nobody wants to discuss is whether or not the black-and-white argument about trade - you're either a free trader or you're a protectionist - is the right one. It's the old 19th century argument. "

John Ralston Saul

Black-And-White

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors. "

John Ralston Saul

" Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little short of military force can keep them in place. "

John Ralston Saul

" When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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. "

John Ralston Saul

" How can we possibly say the root of the Canadian approach to citizenship and immigration comes from Europe or the United States? I mean, we just don't do the same things. What I've said, very simply, is that unlike other colonies, for the first 250 years approximately, indigenous people were either the dominant force or an equal force. "

John Ralston Saul

Indigenous People

" The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt. "

John Ralston Saul