John Ralston Saul Quotes

What nobody wants to discuss is whether or not the black-and-white argument about trade - you're either a free trader or you're a protectionist - is the right one. It's the old 19th century argument.

- John Ralston Saul

People who believe in freedom of expression have spent several centuries fighting against censorship, in whatever form. We have to be certain the 'Net' doesn't become the site for technological book burning.

- John Ralston Saul

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.

- John Ralston Saul

If you live in a democracy, it's very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high abstract generalisations which are, in fact, the most banal and naive cliches dug out of second-rate movements of the late 19th century.

- John Ralston Saul

Canada is the only country in the West that hasn't given in to the rhetoric of fear. The dominant rhetoric is a line of inclusion.

- John Ralston Saul

Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it, too, is dead.

- John Ralston Saul

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

- John Ralston Saul

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

- John Ralston Saul

Some people don't like the 'comeback' because that suggests they went somewhere, which they didn't. That isn't what I mean. In my mind, people were doing well, and then they went right down, and they made a comeback. It's not that they went anywhere. It's that their fortunes went way down, and then they came back.

- 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

In the European tradition, rivers are seen as divisions between peoples. But in the Aboriginal tradition, rivers are seen as the glue, the highway, the linkage between people, not the separation. And that's the history of Canada: our rivers and lakes were our highways.

- John Ralston Saul

The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force.

- John Ralston Saul

The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.

- John Ralston Saul

The fighting back by indigenous people started in 1900: OK, they've cornered us. Our population is almost gone; they've defeated us. From there, the modern Indian rights movement started, and it was a very hard fight, with a lot of stuff going against them.

- John Ralston Saul

How can we possibly say the root of the Canadian approach to citizenship and immigration comes from Europe or the United States? I mean, we just don't do the same things. What I've said, very simply, is that unlike other colonies, for the first 250 years approximately, indigenous people were either the dominant force or an equal force.

- John Ralston Saul

The merger mania which goes on and on and on is the sign of the disappearance of competition. As we deregulate, the mergers increase, which means there's less and less competition. At the national level, at the regional level, but also at the international level.

- John Ralston Saul

Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little short of military force can keep them in place.

- John Ralston Saul

Languages and cultures are disappearing at an enormously fast rate, and many of them are in Canada. These are extreme examples of removal of freedom of expression - to actually lose a language and the ability to express that culture.

- John Ralston Saul

When I dig around in the roots of how we imagine ourselves, how we govern, how we live together in communities - how we treat one another when we are not being stupid - what I find is deeply Aboriginal.

- John Ralston Saul

People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

- John Ralston Saul

In Canada, there's a surprising worship of managerialism versus ownership and wealth creation. There's a real problem in this country with believing that management is the answer to our problems.

- John Ralston Saul

In the early 1980s, the government of New Zealand fell into the hands of true believers, globalist believers, and they embraced the theory of inevitability perhaps more completely than anybody else. And it solved in the very short term some of their debt problems, but in the medium- and long-term, it left them in real economic trouble.

- John Ralston Saul

One of the things non-aboriginal Canadians learned from aboriginal people over the last 400 years is you don't have to be one thing. That's a European idea. There's multiple personalities, multiple loyalties. You can be a Winnipegger, a Manitoban, a Westerner.

- John Ralston Saul

When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.

- John Ralston Saul

Either God is alive, in which case he'll deal with us as he sees fit. Or he is dead, in which case he was never alive, it being unlikely that he died of old age.

- John Ralston Saul

Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.

- John Ralston Saul

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

- John Ralston Saul

I've been up in the Arctic Circle where they have hockey rinks that don't have any heating. So it's - 40 C outside, it's - 55 inside. Or there's a social centre but no budget for anybody to run any programs. Stuff we wouldn't accept in Winnipeg, but we let it go on and on and on.

- John Ralston Saul

Traditionally in capitalism, when you have more cash, you can fund more activity, which produces more jobs and creates more wealth. That's basic economic theory.

- John Ralston Saul

In the Arctic, the Inuit are saying water and land are the same; they're an unbroken unity. In the winter, you travel on the ice because it's the linkage and the easiest way, and in the summer, you move around on the water.

- John Ralston Saul

For about 125 years, give or take, the Canadian government has acted extremely badly - even in a way which should be called evil - breaking treaties, breaking agreements.

- John Ralston Saul

A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.

- John Ralston Saul

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

- John Ralston Saul

Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.

- John Ralston Saul

Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public.

- 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

I don't use the word 'renaissance'. It's flawed because in Latin, it's tied to the rebirth of Christ... It's a word that's tied to a European concept.

- John Ralston Saul

Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters aren't 'real' writers and, so, don't merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PEN's attention.

- John Ralston Saul

Democracy is extremely complex; it is extremely concrete. It's about constantly choosing, finding, developing practical options within the common good. Constantly searching for how to express in a practical way the common good, not in some grand way, some grand and absolute way, but in a very comfortable way.

- John Ralston Saul

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

- John Ralston Saul

There's nothing wrong with paying taxes; they should be paid in proportion to how rich you are. This idea that you're going to get better growth by cutting taxes at the top has no historical justification. And it's certainly not an argument in favor of capitalism.

- John Ralston Saul

You look around the world in 2013, and you say, 'How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison?' One or two. 'How many generals or bankers?' Two or three. 'But how many writers?' 850 or so.

- 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

Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.

- 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

You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real.

- John Ralston Saul

Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything.

- John Ralston Saul

There's two ways of dealing with fears of mortality. One of them is to hide, so every day you wear the same suit and go to the same job... and the other is to reinvent yourself. I think I reinvent myself all the time. The idea that I would have to be one thing for the rest of my life would just be a soul-destroying idea.

- John Ralston Saul

If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

- John Ralston Saul

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

- John Ralston Saul