John Ralston Saul Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public has begun to believe the lack of clarity must be a sign of artistic talent.

  John Ralston Saul

  Believe, Simplicity, Artistic

• After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans ... There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les Anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them.

  John Ralston Saul

  Illustration, People, Insulting

  "Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century". Book by John Ralston Saul, 1997.

• The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.

  John Ralston Saul

  Communication, Mean, Shields

  John Ralston Saul (2013). “Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”, p.9, Simon and Schuster

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

  John Ralston Saul

  Imagination, Language, Aim

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