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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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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
Private
Castrate
Imagination
Subjecting
Public
Elitism
Language
Renders
Power
Established
Always
Complexity
Aim
Serve

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Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
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Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
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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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Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.
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McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.
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People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
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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.
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United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
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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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There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.
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