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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.

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
Cities
Phrases
Class
Variety
Individual
Individuals
Confirming
Used
Entertainment
Provincial
Wells
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Assert
Well
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Thereby
World
Second
Phrase
Events
Insecure

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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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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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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.
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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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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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Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
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In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
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If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.
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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.
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Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created
John Ralston Saul
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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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Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
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We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
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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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Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
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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.
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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
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People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
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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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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