Quote

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

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John Ralston Saul
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Author
Columnist
Investment Banker
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
John Ralston Saul
John Saul
Values
Absence
Fear
Standing
Made
Value
Way
Serious
Widespread
System
Participation
Vision
Void
Belief
Produced
Society
Rational

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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.
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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.
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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.
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People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
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It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.
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Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
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Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
John Ralston Saul
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Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
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We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
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Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
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There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.
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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
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If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.
John Ralston Saul
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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
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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
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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
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Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
John Ralston Saul
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Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
John Ralston Saul
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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.
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Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
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