John Ralston Saul quotes

Freedom: An occupied space which must be reoccupied every day. (John Ralston Saul)
Thus 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. View quote
John Ralston Saul
United States: .... A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies. View quote
John Ralston Saul
Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery. View quote
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. View quote
John Ralston Saul
Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet. View quote
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. View quote
John Ralston Saul
Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death. View quote
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. View quote
John Ralston Saul
Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated. View quote
John Ralston Saul
It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong. (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. View quote
John Ralston Saul
[C]ontent [is] an obstacle to the exercise of power. View quote
John Ralston Saul
Faith: The opposite of dogmatism. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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?" View quote
John Ralston Saul
Realism isn't pessimism. And though the anti-reform interests have won an unconscionable number of battles over the last decade, the war is by no means over. View quote
John Ralston Saul
I would remind you...that Socrates was executed not for saying what things were or should be, but for seeking practical indications of where some reasonable approximation of truth might be. He was executed not for his megalomania or grandiose propositions or certitudes, but for stubbornly doubting the absolute truths of others. (John Ralston Saul)
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong. View quote
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. View quote
John Ralston Saul
As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity. View quote
John Ralston Saul
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. View quote
John Ralston Saul