John Ralston Saul Quotes

A Big Mac – the communion wafer of consumption.

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

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

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.

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

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

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.

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

Dictionary – opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.

Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything.

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

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

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.

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

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

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.

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