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" 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
Child
Paradise
Years
Related Quotes:
" Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. "
John Ralston Saul
Must
Day
Every Day
" Everyone has an equal right to inequality. "
John Ralston Saul
Right
Equal
Everyone
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" People who believe in freedom of expression have spent several centuries fighting against censorship, in whatever form. We have to be certain the 'Net' doesn't become the site for technological book burning. "
John Ralston Saul
Book
Believe
Freedom
" A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption. "
John Ralston Saul
Mac
Big
Consumption
" Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death. "
John Ralston Saul
Death
Statement
Nothing
" 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
" 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
" Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public. "
John Ralston Saul
Public
Strong
Democracy
" 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
" You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real. "
John Ralston Saul
People
Thinking
Deep
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy. "
John Ralston Saul
Economy
Fighting
Useful
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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