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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. "
John Ralston Saul
Christ
Renaissance
Tied
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" 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
" Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. "
John Ralston Saul
Must
Day
Every Day
" 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
Back
Fight
" When I dig around in the roots of how we imagine ourselves, how we govern, how we live together in communities - how we treat one another when we are not being stupid - what I find is deeply Aboriginal. "
John Ralston Saul
Live
Roots
Together
" 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
" Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything. "
John Ralston Saul
Everything
Blame
" 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
" Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order. "
John Ralston Saul
Dictionary
Opinion
Order
" 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
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Capitalism
Wealth
You
" A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption. "
John Ralston Saul
Mac
Big
Consumption
" 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
" There's nothing wrong with paying taxes; they should be paid in proportion to how rich you are. This idea that you're going to get better growth by cutting taxes at the top has no historical justification. And it's certainly not an argument in favor of capitalism. "
John Ralston Saul
Better
Growth
Capitalism
" 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
" Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public. "
John Ralston Saul
Public
Strong
Democracy
" 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
" 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
Alive
Old Age
Never
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value. "
John Ralston Saul
Conscious
Agreement
Money
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Go
Hockey
Budget
" 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
" 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. "
John Ralston Saul
Best
End
Victory
" 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
" The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid. "
John Ralston Saul
Pure
Wealth
Top
" 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
Doing
Comeback
People
" Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy. "
John Ralston Saul
Economy
Fighting
Useful