John Ralston Saul Quotes

Ten per cent of our neighbours survive on charity. 10 per cent of Canadians eat through charity. 10 per cent. Surely if you were prime minister or minister of trade or of industry, you would wake up...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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What I am describing is not only a society dominated by corporatist structures, but by the received wisdom of a corporatist atmosphere: one in which the élites are interest-driven, whatever their...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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The old cliché about having all your eggs in one basket takes on new meaning with Canada and the United States, because there is something even more wrong about having all your eggs in someone...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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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

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans....There could be no more eloquent illustration of the...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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We seem to be unable to allow ourselves the dignity of engaging in this sort of straightforward reconsideration of our acts. After all, questioning is the great strength of democracy; the ability to...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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The dominant system of power in the west has been Platonist — a system which functions on highly developed levels of structure and law. This is the school of pure rationality and fear of the...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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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...

John Ralston Saul

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century - 1997.

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