Top 60 John Ralston Saul Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— John Ralston Saul

3. “We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots.”

— John Ralston Saul

4. “The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.”

— John Ralston Saul

5. “It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.”

— John Ralston Saul

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

6. “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

7. “Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.”

— John Ralston Saul

8. “Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.”

— John Ralston Saul

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

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

— John Ralston Saul

14. “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

15. “People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.”

— John Ralston Saul

16. “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

17. “Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.”

— John Ralston Saul

18. “Happy Hour: a depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature.”

— John Ralston Saul

19. “If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.”

— John Ralston Saul

20. “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

21. “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

22. “In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.”

— John Ralston Saul

23. “Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.”

— John Ralston Saul

24. “To live in delusion is to live in the comfort of ideology.”

— John Ralston Saul

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Everyone has an equal right to inequality.”

— John Ralston Saul

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

— John Ralston Saul

34. “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

35. “McDonald’s is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.”

— John Ralston Saul

36. “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

37. “Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won’t prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.”

— John Ralston Saul

38. “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

39. “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

40. “As an inclusive quality, imagination is thus our primary force for progress, whatever progress is.”

— John Ralston Saul

41. “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

42. “Whenever governments adopt a moral tone – as opposed to an ethical one – you know something is wrong.”

— John Ralston Saul

43. “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

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

— John Ralston Saul

45. “We must discover how to ask simple questions of ourselves.”

— John Ralston Saul

46. “Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.”

— John Ralston Saul

47. “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

48. “A Big Mac – the communion wafer of consumption.”

— John Ralston Saul

49. “Love: A term which has no meaning if defined.”

— John Ralston Saul

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

— John Ralston Saul