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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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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
Cannot
Think
Thinking
People
More quotes by John Ralston Saul
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.
John Ralston Saul
Faith: The opposite of dogmatism.
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
We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
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
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
Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
John Ralston Saul
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
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 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
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
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
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
Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created
John Ralston Saul
Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.
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
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
United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
John Ralston Saul
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
Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.
John Ralston Saul
