Zitat des Tages von John Ralston Saul:
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.
Everyone has an equal right to inequality.
Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.
Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little short of military force can keep them in place.
Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything.
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.
For about 125 years, give or take, the Canadian government has acted extremely badly - even in a way which should be called evil - breaking treaties, breaking agreements.
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.
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.
Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.
Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.
You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real.
Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.
Canada is the only country in the West that hasn't given in to the rhetoric of fear. The dominant rhetoric is a line of inclusion.
The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.
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.
Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.
I don't use the word 'renaissance'. It's flawed because in Latin, it's tied to the rebirth of Christ... It's a word that's tied to a European concept.
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.
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.
You look around the world in 2013, and you say, 'How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison?' One or two. 'How many generals or bankers?' Two or three. 'But how many writers?' 850 or so.
Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.
Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.
The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.
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.
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.
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.
Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it, too, is dead.
The fighting back by indigenous people started in 1900: OK, they've cornered us. Our population is almost gone; they've defeated us. From there, the modern Indian rights movement started, and it was a very hard fight, with a lot of stuff going against them.
In the early 1980s, the government of New Zealand fell into the hands of true believers, globalist believers, and they embraced the theory of inevitability perhaps more completely than anybody else. And it solved in the very short term some of their debt problems, but in the medium- and long-term, it left them in real economic trouble.
Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters aren't 'real' writers and, so, don't merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PEN's attention.