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" 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
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" Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy. "
John Ralston Saul
Competition
Anarchy
Naive
" 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
" 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
Late
High
You
" 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
" 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
" Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value. "
John Ralston Saul
Conscious
Agreement
Money
" 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
" 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
" Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything. "
John Ralston Saul
Everything
Blame
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death. "
John Ralston Saul
Death
Statement
Nothing
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy. "
John Ralston Saul
Economy
Fighting
Useful
" 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
" Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted. "
John Ralston Saul
Hell
Who
Society
" 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
" 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
Communism
Wild
Police
" Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order. "
John Ralston Saul
Dictionary
Opinion
Order
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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