Words matter. These are the best John Ralston Saul Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.
You can always tell you’re in deep trouble when people start thinking money’s real.
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.
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.
Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.
Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.
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.
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.
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.
Dictionary – opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.
The citizen’s job is to be rude – to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.
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.
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.
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.
In the Arctic, the Inuit are saying water and land are the same; they’re an unbroken unity. In the winter, you travel on the ice because it’s the linkage and the easiest way, and in the summer, you move around on the water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
A Big Mac – the communion wafer of consumption.
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.
