Margaret Thatcher - Margaret Hefferman - Walter Bagehot - Paul Foot - Martin Luther King - Noam Chomsky - Michio Kaku -
Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: I stand for consensus? Margaret Thatcher
To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects. Margaret Thatcher
Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus. Margaret Thatcher
There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors ... I mean it. Margaret Thatcher
Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is – sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent. Margaret Heffernan
One of the most common defects of half-instructed minds is to think much of that in which they differ from others, and little of that in which they agree with others. Walter Bagehot, Economist article 11th June 1870, ‘On the Evils of Sectarianism’
The consensus started to break up in the mid-1970s. In 1975 Tory MPs elected a new leader, the strident right-winger Margaret Thatcher. She openly attacked the consensus, calling for a return to the naked capitalism of the Victorian era. Nationalisation, public spending of all kinds, council houses, state schools and National Health Service hospitals were all at risk from the new ideology of the right ...
The process has continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Thatcher, this time in office, has led the way and the Labour Party has followed. Today we have a new consensus, based on unemployment rather than full employment, on free market capitalism rather than a mixed economy, and on an acceptance of the right to be rich rather than a right not to be poor. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch6
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. Martin Luther King
The ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged. Elections are largely a ritual form. In congressional elections virtually all incumbents are returned to office, a reflection of the vacuity of the political system and the choices it offers. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little. Michio Kaku