A Quote by John Ralston Saul

The best defence [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen.' The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves.

John Ralston Saul

Quote Topics

Aggressiveness Being Best Boring Build Citizen Civilizations Consuming Defence Democracy Democratic Good Inefficient Involved Involvement Need Our Process Public Public Good Requires See Slow Something Static Themselves Time Time-Consuming Which

Quote Author

John Ralston Saul
Canadian - Author
Born: June 19, 1947

Public control of the political process requires public financing. The restoration of our American Democracy depends upon public financing.

Dennis Kucinich

Naturalization is the process by which a citizen, or subject of a foreign nation or kingdom, is made a citizen of the United States. It is evident that the Constitutional Convention thought that it was important that this process should be placed under the exclusive control of the Federal Government and not of the States.

Samuel Freeman Miller

If you believe in democracy, the overreach of leaders is a good reminder that vigorous public debate and time-consuming due process are not only more fair and more just, but that over the long term they usually produce better government, too.

Chrystia Freeland

EU expansion is, unfortunately, continuing without a constitution, as a gradual process of standardization - and that's far more dangerous. It is very difficult to slow down this process, which is being pushed forward without significant public participation.

Vaclav Klaus

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.

Teju Cole

Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. 'Due process' and 'judicial process' are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.

Eric Holder

The billionaires and their super PACs increasingly control the American political process. This is not democracy. This is not what brave Americans fought and died to defend. This is oligarchy. This is government of the few, by the few and for the few. We must overturn Citizen United and move to public funding of elections.

Bernie Sanders

The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.

John Ralston Saul

We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

Wangari Maathai

This is the democratic process at work, What you're seeing with this process is the Iraqi people embracing American-style democracy.

Condoleezza Rice

The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Robert Peel

We're just trying to figure out what being a good citizen is, what participating in a democracy is, what taking responsibility for being an American citizen in a global context means to us.

Cecily McMillan

The creative process is just a process and you can't really separate it from life. Growing your hair is a creative process. Your body is creating hair. Being alive is a creative process. Whether it's growing something in the garden or growing a song, the material accumulates. It's the process of being alive; it's the passage of time. Things change.

Antony Hegarty

Whatever I read about Emergency as a part and process of my film, I can say, as a citizen of a democratic country called India, I am certainly not 'for' Emergency, a decision that snatched away the normalcy of human life for 21 months.

Kirti Kulhari

In effective, sustained citizen action, people learn the skills of public life with which to act effectively. "Commons," or the common wealth-the public goods that are objects of sustainable public action-become not only occasions for collaboration by invaluable sources of citizen education in their own right because they are the occasions for learning such skills.