Top 98 John Saul Quotes
#1. 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
#2. She stood a little straighter, closed her eyes, and raised her arms in embrace of her final act.
The she took a deep breath and dove, headfirst--face-first--into oblivion
John Saul
#3. 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
#4. There's a lot of people around here, me included, who think she talked him into an early grave, and that he wasn't the least bit sorry to go.
John Saul
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.
John Ralston Saul
#8. Forty-three years old, and still afraid of my father. Some tycoon, hunh?
John Saul
#10. 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
#11. A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.
John Ralston Saul
#12. John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?
Kingsley Amis
#13. Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.
John Ralston Saul
#14. 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
#15. If you open your house to strangers, who knows who might come in. And what they might be after. Or whom.
John Saul
#16. 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
#17. He was my father, darling, but I have to confess I didn't like him very much.
John Saul
#18. We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots. - John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
John Ralston Saul
#19. United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
John Ralston Saul
#20. Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection.
(V - From Ideology Towards Equilibrium)
John Ralston Saul
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I've given you everything a friend can give, Joe Saul-even contempt, and that's the hardest thing of all.
John Steinbeck
#24. Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
John Ralston Saul
#25. The obligations of citizens is to make it clear that Aboriginal issues are central to our public concerns, that we want them dealt with in a fully democratic context of openness and justice, that we will vote accordingly.
John Ralston Saul
#26. Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.
John Ralston Saul
#27. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Cynthia Ozick
#28. People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
John Ralston Saul
#29. If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.
John Ralston Saul
#30. 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
#32. Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created
John Ralston Saul
#33. Panic: A highly underrated capacity thanks to which individuals are able to indicate clearly that something is wrong ... Given their head, most humans panic with great dignity and imagination. This can be called democratic expression or practical common sense.
John Ralston Saul
#34. 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
#35. Now, with the Transparency Act, the government has set out to reveal wrongdoing by chiefs, not the Department. There is nothing wrong with the act except the context, the attitude and the political purpose.
John Ralston Saul
#36. The country would be far better if the population were half as interested in keeping their minds in as good condition as they tried to keep their bodies.
John Saul
#37. 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
#38. Time is always relative.... For the terminally ill, six months are a lifetime, and not a very long one. To a three-year-old waiting for Christmas, it's an eternity so distant it's not even worth thinking about.
John Saul
#39. Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
John Ralston Saul
#40. John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should he more widely read.
Saul Bellow
#41. You love her, even if you don't believe you do. You're used to her, and a lot of love is nothing more than habit.
John Saul
#43. Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.
John Ralston Saul
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.
John Ralston Saul
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Andrew Saul is John Hall in a business suit. He's wrong on the war, on national security, immigration, abortion. He's Sue Kelly all over again.
Andrew Saul
#51. In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.
John Ralston Saul
#52. The Unconscious Civilisation There is a certain terrifying dignity to the big ideologies. With the stroke of an intellectual argument the planet is put in its place. Only the bravest or the most foolish of individuals would not become passive before such awe inspiring destinies.
John Ralston Saul
#54. but yet I was bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away. I thought also of Saul, and of the evil spirit that did possess him: and did greatly fear that my condition was the same with that of his. 1 Sam. x.
John Bunyan
#55. As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.
John Ralston Saul
#56. 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
#57. In reality high profits tend much more to raise the price of (a piece of) work than high wages. (quoting Adam Smith - ch.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy)
John Ralston Saul
#58. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#60. Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.
John Ralston Saul
#62. The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.
John Ralston Saul
#63. Until lunchtime, he'd had no idea, really, what love was, but now he knew.
It made you happy, and it made you want to dance, and it made you feel funny.
But most of all, you knew you had someone you could trust.
Someone you could tell everything to. Absolutely everything.
John Saul
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real.
John Ralston Saul
#67. What it would be like to simply disappear into the blackness, to float forever in silence and nothingness.
John Saul
#68. Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
John Ralston Saul
#69. The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.
John Ralston Saul
#70. Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul
#71. It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.
John Ralston Saul
#72. 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.
John Ralston Saul
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Our belief in salvation through the market is very much in the Utopian tradition. The economists and managers are the servants of God. Like the medieval scholastics, their only job is to uncover the divine plan. They could never create or stop it. At most they might aspire to small alterations.
John Ralston Saul
#76. 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
#77. Making someone die, he was suddenly sure, was different from killing them. He could never kill anyone. But he could make someone die.
John Saul
#79. Though blue sky and the road's yellow dust and the green of the nearing oasis were all snuffed out, he (newly converted Saul) did not miss them. Light suffused his blinded eyes, his mind.
John Charles Pollock
#80. Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.
John Ralston Saul
#82. Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
John Ralston Saul
#83. Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate.
John Ralston Saul
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
John Ralston Saul
#92. 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
#93. All I want is to be left alone. That's why I have that fence. It's not only to keep the critters in. It's to keep people out.
John Saul
#94. Politics is the force that channels social, cultural, and economic powers and makes them imminent in our lives. Abstaining from politics is like turning your back on a beast when it is angry and intent on ripping your guts out.
John Ralston Saul
#95. You know what you have to do, Matthew." Darkness began to close around him, until all he could see was the head ot the deer. The deer and something beyond... "Do it Matthew," the voice whisperd. "Do it for me...
John Saul
#97. 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
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