Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

John Ralston Saul

Related Quotes:

" Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted. "

John Ralston Saul

" Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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

" Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

John Ralston Saul

" 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

" 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

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

John Ralston Saul

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

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

" 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

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

John Ralston Saul

" Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy. "

John Ralston Saul

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" Democracy is extremely complex; it is extremely concrete. It's about constantly choosing, finding, developing practical options within the common good. Constantly searching for how to express in a practical way the common good, not in some grand way, some grand and absolute way, but in a very comfortable way. "

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

" 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

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

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