John Ralston Saul Quotes

If you cannot create, then buy a company that can. In particular, the large corporations buy small, personnally owned companies that have made breakthroughs in particular areas. They are buying creativity, though the immediate rush this produces doesn't last long. Once integrated into an administrative atmosphere, the creativity is sucked out of them.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)

~ John Ralston Saul

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

technologies come and go. Economic structures evolve and change. Society adjusts. But democratic basics persist in spite of the Tofflers, Gingrich and the chorus of corporate voices.(III - From Corporatism to Democracy)

~ 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

the marketplace is capable only of calculating exclusive costs; that is; excluding all possible costs that interfere with profit. Leadership of society requires the calculation of inclusive costs. To invoke the marketplace, as if calling upon the Holy Spirit, is to limit ourselves to the narrow and short-term interests of exclusion.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)

~ 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

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

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

They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.

~ John Ralston Saul

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

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

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

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

~ 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

Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

~ 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

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

~ John Ralston Saul