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If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.
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
Would
Mired
Malpractice
Economists
Economist
Suits
Doctors
Money
Today
More quotes by 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
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
John Ralston Saul
Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.
John Ralston Saul
People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
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
Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.
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
Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
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
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
Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
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
