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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
Strive
Civilization
Bean
Vision
Beans
Women
Counting
Something
Striving
Men
Reduce
Grown
Silly
More quotes by John Ralston Saul
Faith: The opposite of dogmatism.
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Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
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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.
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United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
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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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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
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
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
Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
