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" 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
Key
Balance
Citizen
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
See
You
Know
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Pen
Attention
Protection
" 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
Will
Capitalism
Free
" Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order. "
John Ralston Saul
Dictionary
Opinion
Order
" Everyone has an equal right to inequality. "
John Ralston Saul
Right
Equal
Everyone
" Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy. "
John Ralston Saul
Economy
Fighting
Useful
" 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
You
Look
Three
" The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt. "
John Ralston Saul
Comfort
Doubt
Job
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Government
Take
Way
" 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
Problem
Problems
Wealth
" Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors. "
John Ralston Saul
Leaders
Only
Risk
" 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
Canada
Country
Fear
" Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society. "
John Ralston Saul
Society
Need
Exercise
" 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
History
Tradition
Seen
" Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. "
John Ralston Saul
Must
Day
Every Day
" 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
Great
Believe
Mind
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Christ
Renaissance
Tied
" 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
Depression
Now
You
" Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy. "
John Ralston Saul
Competition
Anarchy
Naive
" 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
People
Citizenship
Indigenous People
" 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
Language
Canada
Culture
" A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption. "
John Ralston Saul
Mac
Big
Consumption
" There's two ways of dealing with fears of mortality. One of them is to hide, so every day you wear the same suit and go to the same job... and the other is to reinvent yourself. I think I reinvent myself all the time. The idea that I would have to be one thing for the rest of my life would just be a soul-destroying idea. "
John Ralston Saul
Life
Day
Job
" 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
Events
Political
Place
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Hands
True
Government
" 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
Free
Black-And-White
Argument
" 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
Look
Back
People
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Last
You
Years
" 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
Competition
Less
Level
" You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real. "
John Ralston Saul
People
Thinking
Deep