John Ralston Saul Quotes

Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

The left don't get what they want without the government forcing people to do it is the bottom line.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

[C]ontemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist movement.

I think the Mussolinean institution of a third way alternative to comunism is currently still very relevant.

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

Today, the Indian government is trying to present privatization as the alternative to the state, to public enterprise. But privatization is only a further evolution of the centralized state, where the state says that they have the right to give the entire power production in Maharashtra to Enron.

Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx - first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Government being Big Brother.

The fascist state is the corporate state.

Libertarian presidential candidate André Marrou's idea is that "government power is opposed to individual liberty." Must we still debate such sophomoric notions?... Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value.

Some people say 'what would happen if we had a Communist Chancellor of the Exchequer?' I would ask in reply, 'what would happen if he had a lot of Fascist or Mosleyite bank chairmen?' In that event it might be thought disadvantageous to have publicity.

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

70 to 80 percent of country economy is controlled by the Bolivian state, and the other percentage by the private sector. We admit that it's legal, constitutional, that the private sector is entitled to its own economy, but to ensure these profound changes that clearly this government is promoting, including profound changes in the food industry, what we are doing is an important step.

It doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?

It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government.

What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.

Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.

Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State -- a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values -- interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.

Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.

The American public has difficulty believing ... [that] injustice continues to be inflicted upon Indian people because Americans assume that the sympathy and tolerance they feel toward Indians is somehow 'felt' or transferred to the government policy that deals with Indians. This is not the case.

American Communists have the opportunity to preach freely their ideas. It would be absolutely wrong to hold the Soviet government responsible for activities of the American Communists.