John Ralston Saul Quotes

“Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.”

— John Ralston Saul

Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:
(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;
(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;
(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest
that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.
This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.

— John Ralston Saul

“The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair.”

— John Ralston Saul

Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public has begun to believe the lack of clarity must be a sign of artistic talent.

— John Ralston Saul

“Virtually every politician portrayed in film or on television over the last decade has been venal, corrupt, opportunistic, cynical, if not worse. Whether these dramatized images are accurate or exagerated matters little. The corporatist system wins either way: directly through corruption and indirectly through the damage done to the citizen's respect for the representative system.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy)”

— John Ralston Saul

“In general, democracy and individualism have advanced in spite of and often against specific economic interest. Both democracy and individualism have been based upon financial sacrifice, not gain. Even in Athens, a large part of the 7,000 citizens who participated regularly in assemblies were farmers who had to give up several days' work to go into town to talk and listen.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Fashion is merely the lowest form of ideology. To wear or not to wear blue jeans, to holiday or not to holiday in a particular place can contribute to social acceptance or bring upon us the full opprobrium of the group. Then, a few months or years later, we look back and our obsession, our fears of ridicule, seem a bit silly. By then, we are undoubtedly caught up in new fashions.
(I - The Great Leap Backwards)”

— John Ralston Saul

“If individuals do not occupy their legitimate position, then it will be occupied by a god or a king or a coalition of interest groups. If citizens do not exercise the powers confered by their legitimacy, others will do so.
(I - The Great Leap Backwards)”

— John Ralston Saul

“Our essential difficulty is that we are seeking in a mechanism, which is necessary, qualities it simply does not possess. The market does not lead, balance or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business.
It cannot give leadership even on straight economic issues. The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today (1995). No one thought about the long- or even medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn't their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests.
(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)”

— John Ralston Saul

“After a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Criticism is perhaps the citizen's primary weapon in the exercise of her legitimacy. That is why, in the corporatist society, conformism, loyalty and silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so punished or marginalized. Who has not experienced this conflict?”

— John Ralston Saul

He who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself.

— John Ralston Saul

“At some point the Indian Act system will go. But that will be the result of a broad conversation involving Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals over how to settle the outstanding treaty, land and other issues. This won't necessarily require a protracted debate. What it will require is that Canadians engage in the conversation instead of sitting back as if it doesn't concern them. We have to be involved because what is needed is a serious transfer of responsibility and money, the exact opposite of dragging out treaty negotiations one by one. We need to do more than empower our governments to act. We need to push them. We need to make this a make-or-break issue. We need to elect or defeat them with these indigenous issues in mind.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Richard Atleo's Principles of Tsawalk,”

— John Ralston Saul

“In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette.”

— 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

“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

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

— John Ralston Saul

“Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.”

— 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

“The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.”

— John Ralston Saul

The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as "Western civilization," they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience.

— John Ralston Saul

If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

— 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

Love: A term which has no meaning if defined.

— 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

“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

“As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.”

— John Ralston Saul

“McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.”

— 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

“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

“People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Not only is the Napoleonic dream stronger today in our imaginations than it has ever been, but one can already feel the slow falling away of moral opprobrium from our memory of Hitler. In another fifty years we may well find ourselves weighed down by a second monstrous dream of pure grandeur to match that of the Emperor. Two men who dared. Two men who were adored. Two men who led with brilliance. Two men who administered fairly and efficiently. Two men who were modest in their own needs but surrounded by lesser beings who profited from their situation and came between the Hero and the people.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other's errors ... Only a sailor can set them straight.”

— 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

“We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.”

— John Ralston Saul

Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't

— John Ralston Saul

“A foreigner is an individual who is considered either comic or sinister. When the victim of a disaster - preferably natural but sometimes political -the foreigner may also be pitied from a distance for a short period of time.”

— 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 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

“Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.”

— John Ralston Saul

“United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.”

— 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

“It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.”

— John Ralston Saul

“Venereal: From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science, the word disease was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing. Which disease? The disease of love.”

— John Ralston Saul

In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

— John Ralston Saul