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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
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Investment Banker
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
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Ottawa (Ontario)
John Ralston Saul
John Saul
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World
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Insecure
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More quotes by John Ralston Saul
We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.
John Ralston Saul
Faith: The opposite of dogmatism.
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
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.
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
McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
John Ralston Saul
Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
John Ralston Saul
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul
Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
John Ralston Saul
