Explore Quotes by John Ralston Saul

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

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

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.