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We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
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
Asks
Simple
Must
Discover
Questions
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
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
Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created
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
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
If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.
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
Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
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
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
People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
John Ralston Saul
Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
John Ralston Saul
