Quotes About Consensus

Essentially we need a new social consensus for economic reform as New Labour has achieved in Britain.

I think there's bipartisan support in the Senate to pass a good reform bill.

The reform process began with the historic consensus on the Charter of National Action, in which the Bahraini people decided on a new chapter of their history.

The key to any successful plan is buy-in from the public, and what this process has demonstrated is the importance of including citizens in formulating a consensus plan that preserves our beautiful refuge.

To regain our political footing, we must prove to moderates that Democrats can make tough choices.

In this context, social consensus, and institutions that embody this consensus, must be made effective in order for democratization not to be abused as a provisional instrument to establish an anti-democratic regime.

What's going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection - like in the U.K.

A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won't allow it.

My deal is you start as far to the right as you can get, and go to the conference committee with the Senate, and hopefully end up with something you can live with.

I think if you're going to get anything done in the Senate, you have to be on the same sheet of music. If you don't get people on the same sheet of music it comes out pretty horrible.

Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

It would be hard enough to win the Empire to Christianity without Christians arguing among themselves about what they were supposed to believe.

I say, they [those at the top] don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs.

If we have no commonly agreed criterion for measuring length, we will never agree about how much land is yours, and how much is mine, or how to cut lengths of wood when we build a house. There would be chaos.

The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.

Fifty years would seem to be time enough to prepare a definitive history of the Second World War. In an age of instant data-gathering, one might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus for interpreting the main events of the war. In reality, no such consensus exists.

The notion of a neutral, mainstream national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.

Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy.

When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

I've got billions of sparrows to worry about as well as everything else'. So there's the whole idea that whatever it is that you believe, it can never be valid unless you have some consensus reality demonstration.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown committed to John Major's spending envelopes in 1997. No-one said that Tony Blair and John Major were identical. This happens quite often that parties actually, despite all the sound and fury, agree on the overall need to make sure that we live within our means as a country.

It's too much to expect in an academic setting that we should all agree, but it is not too much to expect discipline and unvarying civility.

It's an embarrassment that we don't have a broad enough consensus among political leaders that true reform should take place. I could count the members of Congress on one hand that took these issues seriously.