John Ralston Saul Quotes

A President in a ... crisis makes, say, 10 bets a day. Maybe I made the wrong choice three times.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.

Fearing the weakness of democracy, men have always sought safety in technocrats. But ... [we] have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down before the divine right of experts.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.

The Nation trembled on the brink. Events moved with such speed that it was necessary to decide to act on the instant, as each successive crisis arose.

In our government we drive decisions either by leadership of by crises. If the leadership is not there, we rely on crises.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

The prime minister found something hopeful in the man's eyes and manner. The 30 or so people who run this world analyze one another that way and then make decisions of life and death for us. Scary, but true.

Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment.

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

The essence of American politics consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.

There is no school that teaches you how to run a state. You make mistakes, but you learn on the job.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

There is no question that FEMA and the National Emergency Response System did not fail America the day that Katrina hit. They failed the day before and the days before that.

The person who knows "how" will always have a job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss

It takes time and effort and preparation to think. Statesmen are far too busy making speeches to think.

Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment.

The actions you plan to take and the actions you actually decide to take [in a crisis] are not always the same.

When you're President you have to make a lot of tough decisions. You have to keep lining them up and making them.

In great crises, a man who has to act or speak stands bare and stripped of choice.

Politics is the management of expectations.