Quotes from John Ralston Saul

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything.

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.

There's two ways of dealing with fears of mortality. One of them is to hide, so every day you wear the same suit and go to the same job... and the other is to reinvent yourself. I think I reinvent myself all the time. The idea that I would have to be one thing for the rest of my life would just be a soul-destroying idea.

One of the things non-aboriginal Canadians learned from aboriginal people over the last 400 years is you don't have to be one thing. That's a European idea. There's multiple personalities, multiple loyalties. You can be a Winnipegger, a Manitoban, a Westerner.

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.

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

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

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

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

The recession is over." This phrase has been used twice a year since 1973 by government leaders throughout the West. Its meaning is unclear. See: Depression.

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.

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

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

Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

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.

Content is an obstacle to the exercise of power.

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.

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.

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.

Democracy is extremely complex; it is extremely concrete. It's about constantly choosing, finding, developing practical options within the common good. Constantly searching for how to express in a practical way the common good, not in some grand way, some grand and absolute way, but in a very comfortable way.

There's nothing wrong with paying taxes; they should be paid in proportion to how rich you are. This idea that you're going to get better growth by cutting taxes at the top has no historical justification. And it's certainly not an argument in favor of capitalism.

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.