John Ralston Saul Quotes & Sayings

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. — John Ralston Saul

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

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy. — John Ralston Saul

This absence of intellectual mechanisms for questioning our own actions becomes clear when the expression of any unstructured doubt - for example, over the export of arms to potential enemies or the loss of shareholder power to managers or the loss of parliamentary power to the executive - is automatically categorized as naive or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs. And should we attempt to use sensible words to deal with these problems, they will be caught up immediately in the structures of the official arguments which accompany the official modern ideologies - arguments as sterile as the ideologies are irrelevant. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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 — John Ralston Saul

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) — John Ralston Saul

The faithful witness, like ... Socrates, Voltaire, and Swift and Christ himself, is at his best when he is questioning and clarifying and avoiding the specialists obsession with solution. He betrays society when he is silent ... He is true to himself and to people when his clarity causes disquiet. — John Ralston Saul

[W]e have more than two options ... a critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power ... [O]ur problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others. — John Ralston Saul

Venereal: From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science, the word disease was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing. Which disease? The disease of love. — John Ralston Saul

Happy family: The existence and maintenance of [this] is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances. — John Ralston Saul

Now, with the Transparency Act, the government has set out to reveal wrongdoing by chiefs, not the Department. There is nothing wrong with the act except the context, the attitude and the political purpose. — John Ralston Saul

At some point the Indian Act system will go. But that will be the result of a broad conversation involving Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals over how to settle the outstanding treaty, land and other issues. This won't necessarily require a protracted debate. What it will require is that Canadians engage in the conversation instead of sitting back as if it doesn't concern them. We have to be involved because what is needed is a serious transfer of responsibility and money, the exact opposite of dragging out treaty negotiations one by one. We need to do more than empower our governments to act. We need to push them. We need to make this a make-or-break issue. We need to elect or defeat them with these indigenous issues in mind. — John Ralston Saul

Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order. — John Ralston Saul

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

You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real. — John Ralston Saul

Remember, we non-Aboriginals were signatories. As a non-Aboriginal, I say we. And through Canada's signatures we committed ourselves to the permanency of our relationship with the words that these treaties would stand "as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows." These were and remain binding legal documents. Perhaps more important, with our signatures we committed our government to act always with the Honour of the Crown. — John Ralston Saul

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

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

The recession is over. This phrase has been used twice a year since 1973 by government leaders throughout the West. Its meaning is unclear. See: Depression. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is. — John Ralston Saul

Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship. — John Ralston Saul

The void in our society has been produced by the absence of values ... we have no widespread belief in the value of participation. The rational system has made us fear standing out in any serious way. — John Ralston Saul

the regional governments can't raise taxes. The source of revenue would simply leave for another region. In fact, the effect of decentralization without guaranteed funding and national or multinational standards is a competition between regions for the lowest possible tax rates.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy) — John Ralston Saul

Politics is the force that channels social, cultural, and economic powers and makes them imminent in our lives. Abstaining from politics is like turning your back on a beast when it is angry and intent on ripping your guts out. — 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

Sure enough a few delinquent chiefs have been uncovered. The media then focused on them, as if they were representative of all chiefs. But the reality is that very few chiefs were found to be acting badly. Most were found to be underpaid. Did anyone bother to compare the percentage of overpaid chiefs with the percentage of overpaid CEOs in the private sector? The percentage of corrupt or incompetent chiefs with the percentage of corrupt or incompetent mayors? Toronto, Montreal, Laval and London come to mind, representing a large percentage of Canada's population. On August — John Ralston Saul

He who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself. — John Ralston Saul

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

Criticism is perhaps the citizen's primary weapon in the exercise of her legitimacy. That is why, in the corporatist society, conformism, loyalty and silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so punished or marginalized. Who has not experienced this conflict? — John Ralston Saul

Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. — John Ralston Saul

Our essential difficulty is that we are seeking in a mechanism, which is necessary, qualities it simply does not possess. The market does not lead, balance or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business.
It cannot give leadership even on straight economic issues. The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today (1995). No one thought about the long- or even medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn't their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests.
(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth) — John Ralston Saul

Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong. — John Ralston Saul

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

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

If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits. — John Ralston Saul

The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her own government ... Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization
our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity
to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists. — John Ralston Saul

The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as "Western civilization," they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience. — John Ralston Saul

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

The Age of Reason has turned out to be the Age of Structure; a time when, in the absence of purpose, the drive for power as a value in itself has become the principal indicator of social approval. And the winning of power has become the measure of social merit. — John Ralston Saul

The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it. — John Ralston Saul

Fashion is merely the lowest form of ideology. To wear or not to wear blue jeans, to holiday or not to holiday in a particular place can contribute to social acceptance or bring upon us the full opprobrium of the group. Then, a few months or years later, we look back and our obsession, our fears of ridicule, seem a bit silly. By then, we are undoubtedly caught up in new fashions.
(I - The Great Leap Backwards) — John Ralston Saul

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death. — John Ralston Saul

Virtually every politician portrayed in film or on television over the last decade has been venal, corrupt, opportunistic, cynical, if not worse. Whether these dramatized images are accurate or exagerated matters little. The corporatist system wins either way: directly through corruption and indirectly through the damage done to the citizen's respect for the representative system.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy) — John Ralston Saul

Everyone has an equal right to inequality. — John Ralston Saul

Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate. — John Ralston Saul

The best defence [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen.' The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves. — John Ralston Saul

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

As the years go by, the circle of the Ojibway gets bigger and bigger. Canadians of all colours and religion are entering that circle. You might feel that you have roots somewhere else, but in reality, you are right here with us. I do not know if you feel the throbbing of the land in your chest, and if you feel the bear is your brother with a spirit purer and stronger than yours, or if the elk is on a higher level of life than is man. You may not share the spiritual anguish as I see the earth ravaged by the stranger, but you can no longer escape my fate as the soil turns barren and the rivers poison. Much against my will, and probably yours, time and circumstance have put us together in the same circle. And so I come not to plead with you to save me from the monstrous stranger of capitalist greed and technology. I come to inform you that my danger is your danger too. My genocide is your genocide. — John Ralston Saul

Love: A term which has no meaning if defined. — John Ralston Saul

[C]ontent [is] an obstacle to the exercise of power. — John Ralston Saul

McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity. — John Ralston Saul

There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. — John Ralston Saul

We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves. — John Ralston Saul

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

There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist. — John Ralston Saul

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created — John Ralston Saul

In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette. — John Ralston Saul

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

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. — John Ralston Saul

World class is a phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment events, as well as a wide variety of insecure individuals, to assert that they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are. — John Ralston Saul

The obligations of citizens is to make it clear that Aboriginal issues are central to our public concerns, that we want them dealt with in a fully democratic context of openness and justice, that we will vote accordingly. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say. — John Ralston Saul

The Unconscious Civilisation There is a certain terrifying dignity to the big ideologies. With the stroke of an intellectual argument the planet is put in its place. Only the bravest or the most foolish of individuals would not become passive before such awe inspiring destinies. — John Ralston Saul

We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots. - John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium — John Ralston Saul

The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century's elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian's case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy. — John Ralston Saul

Wordsmiths who serve established power ... castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim. — John Ralston Saul

In reality high profits tend much more to raise the price of (a piece of) work than high wages. (quoting Adam Smith - ch.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy) — John Ralston Saul

A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption. — John Ralston Saul

Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value. — John Ralston Saul

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy. — John Ralston Saul

The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

Richard Atleo's Principles of Tsawalk, — John Ralston Saul

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

The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

Faith: The opposite of dogmatism. — John Ralston Saul

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. — John Ralston Saul

United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies. — John Ralston Saul