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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

Hockey

Budget

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Everyone has an equal right to inequality. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "