Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

Either God is alive, in which case he'll deal with us as he sees fit. Or he is dead, in which case he was never alive, it being unlikely that he died of old age.

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.

The citizen's job is to be rude - to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.

If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.

Only when God was said to have died did various leaders, professions and sectors risk pushing themselves forward as successors.

Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything.

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.

Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.

Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.

Freedom - an occupied space which must be reoccupied every day.

Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.

Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.

How can we possibly say the root of the Canadian approach to citizenship and immigration comes from Europe or the United States? I mean, we just don't do the same things. What I've said, very simply, is that unlike other colonies, for the first 250 years approximately, indigenous people were either the dominant force or an equal force.

In the European tradition, rivers are seen as divisions between peoples. But in the Aboriginal tradition, rivers are seen as the glue, the highway, the linkage between people, not the separation. And that's the history of Canada: our rivers and lakes were our highways.

One of the things non-aboriginal Canadians learned from aboriginal people over the last 400 years is you don't have to be one thing. That's a European idea. There's multiple personalities, multiple loyalties. You can be a Winnipegger, a Manitoban, a Westerner.

People who believe in freedom of expression have spent several centuries fighting against censorship, in whatever form. We have to be certain the 'Net' doesn't become the site for technological book burning.

Some people don't like the 'comeback' because that suggests they went somewhere, which they didn't. That isn't what I mean. In my mind, people were doing well, and then they went right down, and they made a comeback. It's not that they went anywhere. It's that their fortunes went way down, and then they came back.

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.

The merger mania which goes on and on and on is the sign of the disappearance of competition. As we deregulate, the mergers increase, which means there's less and less competition. At the national level, at the regional level, but also at the international level.

There's two ways of dealing with fears of mortality. One of them is to hide, so every day you wear the same suit and go to the same job... and the other is to reinvent yourself. I think I reinvent myself all the time. The idea that I would have to be one thing for the rest of my life would just be a soul-destroying idea.

When I dig around in the roots of how we imagine ourselves, how we govern, how we live together in communities - how we treat one another when we are not being stupid - what I find is deeply Aboriginal.

You can always tell you're in deep trouble when people start thinking money's real.

Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

I believe as human beings we are out of balance, out of synch with the earth.

But all the money in the world cannot make you happy either, so there has to be a balance.

In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.

But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

And Big Night, I think by the end the brothers find that balance, when they touch each other on the shoulder over breakfast and it's understood that what should never have driven them apart almost drove them apart. I think that's a true moment.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

In 1844, there was a balance of perhaps of a couple of thousand dollars on the cr side.

You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

You can't have too much of everything, you must have a balance, that's very important.

I've watched those shows my whole life - being on one is like a dream. It's hard to balance that dream with the fact that this is the Edie I've known my whole life.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

I think what I'm going to do is get more balance in my life to still be able to go out and play the hard rock 'n' roll and do what I like to do in music.

We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.

We're on the verge of a financial collapse unless we balance the budget, and that means some really, really tough decisions.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

But I also like to be in control, like anyone else. I try to achieve a balance.