Best 77 quotes of John Ralston Saul on MyQuotes

A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.

A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.

A foreigner is an individual who is considered either comic or sinister. When the victim of a disaster - preferably natural but sometimes political -the foreigner may also be pitied from a distance for a short period of time.

After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans ... There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les Anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them.

After a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.

All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.

An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.

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

As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.

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

Born in elevators and supermarkets, Muzak has spread to restaurants, hotels, airplanes, telephone hold services, and waiting rooms. The public-relations experts believe that human beings fear silence - that is, the absence of constantly imposed direction. It is further believed that if we can be relieved of our fears, we will gain enough self-confidence to buy, eat, vote, fly, or simply go on living.

Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.

Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.

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.

Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.

Happy Hour: a depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature.

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

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.

If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

If individuals do not occupy their legitimate position, then it will be occupied by a god or a king or a coalition of interest groups. If citizens do not exercise the powers confered by their legitimacy, others will do so. (I - The Great Leap Backwards)

If the technocratic class often invokes technology, it is because these inanimate objects can take on a trajectory of their own and so cover for the manager's inability to give leadership.

I have a theory of statistics: if you can double them or halve them and they still work, they are really good statistics.

In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

In general, democracy and individualism have advanced in spite of and often against specific economic interest. Both democracy and individualism have been based upon financial sacrifice, not gain. Even in Athens, a large part of the 7,000 citizens who participated regularly in assemblies were farmers who had to give up several days' work to go into town to talk and listen.

In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.

It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.

Love: A term which has no meaning if defined.

Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If asked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands.

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.

McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.

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

Moral crusade: Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys. Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own personal pleasure, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates, and religious professionals suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god.

Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.

Not only is the Napoleonic dream stronger today in our imaginations than it has ever been, but one can already feel the slow falling away of moral opprobrium from our memory of Hitler. In another fifty years we may well find ourselves weighed down by a second monstrous dream of pure grandeur to match that of the Emperor. Two men who dared. Two men who were adored. Two men who led with brilliance. Two men who administered fairly and efficiently. Two men who were modest in their own needs but surrounded by lesser beings who profited from their situation and came between the Hero and the people.

Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience: (1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups; (2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies; (3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest. This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.

Obviously we don't have 300 million people. We haven't got a big army. We don't have Hollywood. We're a medium small-sized country. We have to do what medium small-sized countries do, which-even though we're not smarter than other people-is to make ourselves seem to be smarter. We have to work harder and know more than other people.

Of course, corporations and governments have a right to something for their money. They pay the wages. But they don't have the ethical right to literally purchase the copyright of a citizen's potential contribution to society. In a democracy they should not have the legal right to silence the quasi-totality of the functioning élite in order to satisfy a managerial taste for control and secrecy.

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

Our belief in salvation through the market is very much in the Utopian tradition. The economists and managers are the servants of God. Like the medieval scholastics, their only job is to uncover the divine plan. They could never create or stop it. At most they might aspire to small alterations.

Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't

Panic: A highly underrated capacity thanks to which individuals are able to indicate clearly that something is wrong. Given their head, most humans panic with great dignity and imagination. This can be called democratic expression or practical common sense.

Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.

Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection. (V - From Ideology Towards Equilibrium)

Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public has begun to believe the lack of clarity must be a sign of artistic talent.

Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other's errors ... Only a sailor can set them straight.