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Quote by John Ralston Saul

“A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.”

Quote by John Ralston Saul

Author

John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul is a Canadian author, political theorist, and public intellectual. He is known for his profound insights into democracy, civil society, and globalization. Saul's work covers a wide range of topics, including political philosophy, history, and cultural commentary. more

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“The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.”

“A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.”

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“That state is a state of slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him.”

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“Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.”

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“People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”

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Book:The Passionate State of Mind

Source: The Passionate State of Mind

“Currency speculation-over a trillion dollars a day-is a tax-free activity. The notion of a tax on "day trades" or other speculative swaps was revived in recent years, but has been studiously ignored by all our purveyors of conventional economic wisdom. That is because we have been persuaded, against logic, and moral sense, that the institution that most needs our support these days is not society, nor the human community, but the global corporation.”

“Corporations have nothing to do with values, and they know it, and sometimes say it.”

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“Capital in money form has no citizenship. It is fungible, an asset capable of moving from place to place in a nanosecond.”

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“Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits. Later on, a Henry Ford might introduce an era of intensely production-minded captains of industry, but the Harrimans, Morgans, Fricks, and Rockefellers were far more interested in the exciting manipulation of huge masses of intangible wealth than in the humdrum business of turning out goods.”

“This is the standard procedure for corporate growth these days; one company buys up another on loans that are floated on the basis of future earnings, and the monopoly or oligopoly created in this way produces the necessary funds by squeezing out competition, and passing the costs along to the consumer. The bucket that holds the new wealth is called a corporation.”