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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

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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
Age
Merit
Purpose
Measure
Values
Absence
Social
Drive
Become
Turned
Indicator
Power
Structure
Indicators
Reason
Value
Principal
Time
Winning
Approval

More quotes by John Ralston Saul

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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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If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.
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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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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
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Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
John Ralston Saul
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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.
John Ralston Saul
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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.
John Ralston Saul
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Faith: The opposite of dogmatism.
John Ralston Saul
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McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.
John Ralston Saul
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Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
John Ralston Saul
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We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
John Ralston Saul
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People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
John Ralston Saul
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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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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
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United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
John Ralston Saul
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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
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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.
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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We have more than two options. A critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power. Our 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
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Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul