Voltaire's Bastards Quotes

“The actor, like the modern man of reason, must have his place determined and his lines memorized before he goes on stage. (...) The public itself has been soothed to such an extent by scripted debates imbued with theoretically "right" answers that it no longer seems to respond positively to arguments which create doubt. Real doubt creates real fear. (...)
De Gaulle found a sensible compromise, given the times. He reserved his public thinking for the printed page and on those pages he allowed himself to ask fundamental questions. But when he spoke, it was either with reason or with emotion - that is to say, with answers or with mythology. He divided himself between the man of letters, who knows how to live with doubt, and the man of state, who is the epitome of certainty. the brilliance of this approach could be seen in the frustration and sometimes fury of the opposing elites.
The truism today is that mythological figures and men of power should not think in public. They should limit themselves to affirming truths. Stars, after all, are rarely equipped to engage in public debate. They would abhor the idea that the proper way to deal with confusion in society is to increase that confusion by asking uncomfortable questions until the source of the difficulties is exposed.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century’s elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian’s case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“after a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“He who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“A civilization unable to differentiate between illusion and reality is usually believed to be at the tail end of its existence.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“Such sudden respectability for undisciplined self-interest is one of the most surprising developments of the last three decades. It seems to indicate just how confused our society has become.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“This absence of intellectual mechanisms for questioning our own actions becomes clear when the expression of any unstructured doubt — for example, over the export of arms to potential enemies or the loss of shareholder power to managers or the loss of parliamentary power to the executive — is automatically categorized as naive or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs. And should we attempt to use sensible words to deal with these problems, they will be caught up immediately in the structures of the official arguments which accompany the official modern ideologies — arguments as sterile as the ideologies are irrelevant.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“This replacement of officers with strategical talents by those with a taste for quantity bears a curious resemblance to what happened in the armies of the European monarchies at the end of the eighteenth century. Guibert wrote about the unreformed French army of 1773: “We have created a uniform which obliges the soldier and the officer to spend three hours a day on their toilette, which has turned men of war into wig brushers, shiners and polishers.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“These large ideas applied to little problems are the result of an obsession with efficiency. There are two ways to define this word. The first has to do with quality as measured by a cost-versus-value ratio. For example, how much did a meal cost compared to how good was it? The second revolves around the idea that larger production runs permit lower costs per item: thus a McDonald’s hamburger may not be any good, but it is cheaper because there are more of them.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

“Closing the dictionary and opening any history of civilizations, the curious reader might consider the characteristics of societies in decay. At the meeting point between their rise and their decline, societies — or rather the elites of societies — always discover that it is beneath their dignity to continue to do the concrete things which caused their rise. And so they set about organizing their lives in a manner diametrically opposed to that which created their civilization and therefore justified its existence. However, they invariably retain the original supporting vocabulary and mythology of their rise, as if these talismans will protect them.”
― John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West