Top 100 Ralston Quotes
#1. As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don't really change, they just become better actors.
Antonio Garcia Martinez
#2. But stay away from him, Juliana. When we said we wanted to make you a good match, Leighton was not who we imagined."
Even her brother thought Simon too good for her.
"Because he is a duke?"
"What? No," Ralston said, truly perplexed by her instant defensive response. "Because he's an ass.
Sarah MacLean
#3. We are a motley bunch. But we more than make up for it with tenacity." ~ Ralston to Simon
Sarah MacLean
#4. Even as she'd come to know the real Ralston - the Ralston who was not cut from heroic cloth - Callie had failed to see the truth. And, instead of seeing her own heartbreak coming, she had fallen in love, not with her fantasy, but with this new, flawed Ralston.
Sarah MacLean
#5. He raked his fingers through his hair. "She doesn't need me."
Ralston smirked. "You are laboring under that mistaken impression that it is their job to need us. In my experience it is almost always the other way around.
Sarah MacLean
#6. We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots. - John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
John Ralston Saul
#7. James Ralston, my guitar player, has performed with Tina Turner for about 22 years. Jim Hanson on bass has played with Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell and Bruce Springsteen, and they're fantastic musicians and amazing singers they get a really cool vocal sound together.
Vonda Shepard
#8. You write who you are somehow. Even if you try to not to. You can't help but write who you are. I'm just not a very cynical person. I believe in the humanity of people, whether it is just the guys in 'The Full Monty' or Aron Ralston.
Simon Beaufoy
#9. Ralston stiffened at the reference to the stupid wager that caused so much pain and unhappiness. He ignored Oxford's proffered hand, and instead met the baron's concerned gaze, and said, Keep the money. I have her. She's all I want.
Sarah MacLean
#10. And as the bullet ripped through his flesh, Ralston was consumed by a single thought: I never told her that I loved her.
Sarah MacLean
#11. Brother Ralston smiles fondly, only too willing to believe in my womanly frailty. If it weren't to my advantage, I'd slap the smile from his face.
Jessica Spotswood
#12. 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
#13. I feel like I'm climbing as well, if not better, than ever.
Aron Ralston
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.
John Ralston Saul
#18. I was able to first snap the radius and then within another few minutes snap the ulna at the wrist and from there, I had the knife out and applied the tourniquet and went to task. It was a process that took about an hour.
Aron Ralston
#19. Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul
#20. Mastery, on the other hand, is being present with what is occurring, staying with it from beginning to end.
Peter Ralston
#21. The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.
John Ralston Saul
#22. Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
John Ralston Saul
#23. What you're looking at there is my arm, going into the rock ... and there it is - stuck. It's been without circulation for 24 hours. It's pretty well gone.
Aron Ralston
#24. You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real.
John Ralston Saul
#25. 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
#26. We are Fragile, everyone. We all long for something more. Things are said and things are done and the pieces hit the floor. See how fragile.
Ralston Bowles
#27. Adversity is the source of our deepest growth and greatest blessings; embrace it, dare to seek it.
Aron Ralston
#28. Here?"
She gasped, grasping his forearm with her hand.
He growled low in his throat as he watched her attempt to understand the feelings coursing through her. When he spoke, his voice was rough with his own response. "I think you want more than that.
Sarah MacLean
#29. 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
#30. ..humans love complexity of thought. This they pursue on the totally baseless assumption that complexity indicates profundity or truth.
Walter Ralston Martin
#31. 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
#33. Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.
John Ralston Saul
#35. It adds up, but I deem it all necessary, even the camera gear. I enjoy photographing the otherworldly colors and shapes presented in the convoluted depths of slot canyons and the prehistoric artwork preserved in their alcoves.
Aron Ralston
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.
John Ralston Saul
#40. Paradoxically, the more I learned to let go of my own wishes and desires (in this case, the desire not to be hit), the more they became possible.
Peter Ralston
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. False hope is better than believing you're the world's biggest loser.
Duncan Ralston
#49. When we find inspiration, we need to take action for ourselves and for our communities. Even if it means making a hard choice, or cutting out something and leaving it in your past.
Aron Ralston
#50. It was Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse who said that simply because a person is a member of a specific denomination, there is no reason to suppose that the entire denomination is represented by that person's theology,
Walter Ralston Martin
#52. In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
John Ralston Saul
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I am not who I would like to be, It's just who I am right now.
Ralston Bowles
#62. Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
John Ralston Saul
#64. Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.
John Ralston Saul
#66. When I climb a fourteener, a 14,000-foot/4,260-meter peak, in the winter by myself, I leave an itinerary and information about where my vehicle will be parked and the name of the county sheriff to contact in case I don't get home.
Aron Ralston
#67. 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
#68. Your perception of the world around you is not necessarily the same as what is actually occurring.
Peter Ralston
#69. You'll never find your limits until you've gone too far.
Aron Ralston
#70. If you want someone to show up and help you if something bad happens, you'd better tell someone where you're going. And of course I wanted someone to know - but I'd made a choice and it was a choice I was going to have to live with.
Aron Ralston
#71. 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
#72. Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
John Ralston Saul
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.
John Ralston Saul
#77. 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
#78. Judging by my degradation in the last 24 hours, I'll be surprised if I make it to Tuesday.
Aron Ralston
#79. 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
#80. I limited myself to one shout a day. But I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded panicked, it sounded scared. And I knew from experience you can't hear more than 50 yards either way down a canyon.
Aron Ralston
#81. Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.
John Ralston Saul
#82. 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
#83. 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
#85. Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.
John Ralston Saul
#86. I'd fallen in love with a woman but she broke up with me and I was devastated. Six months later, I went into a suicidal depression from the break-up of the relationship, but I resolved to not do what my friends had done. And so I reached out for help.
Aron Ralston
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. It's me. I chose this. I chose all of this - this rock has been waiting for me my entire life. I've been moving towards it my whole life.
Aron Ralston
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Perhaps it's time, I muse, to close those chapters and remember the enduring lesson of my entrapment: that relationships, not accomplishments, are what's important in life.
Aron Ralston
#94. I just believe that life is more than rehearsing how to die.
Ralston Bowles
#95. 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
#96. Listening to Eric Taylor is better than reading a Larry McMurtry novel and easier on the eyes.
Ralston Bowles
#97. Indeed, it has affirmed my belief that our purpose as spiritual beings is to follow our bliss, seek our passions, and live our lives as inspirations to each other.
Aron Ralston
#98. May your boulders be your blessings. May you be able to embrace them. And may you find what's extraordinary in yourself.
Aron Ralston
#99. 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
#100. 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
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