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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

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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
Silly
Strive
Civilization
Bean
Vision
Beans
Women
Counting
Something
Striving
Men
Reduce
Grown

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McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.
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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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World class is a phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment events, as well as a wide variety of insecure individuals, to assert that they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.
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Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
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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.
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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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Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
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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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
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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.
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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Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
John Ralston Saul
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Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.
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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We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
John Ralston Saul
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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
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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
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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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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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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