Quotes About Consensus

El consenso más importante de la sociedad moderna es la organización del tránsito. La manera como puede interrelacionarse una marea de desconocidos que comparten un mismo camino y viajan casi todos sin incidentes. Con un conductor disidente hay suficiente para crear anarquía.

In politics you couldn't please everybody, but you still had to do the calculus to please most of everybody, or you didn't get the votes.

Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.

History is lies agreed upon

Once people have that sense that their voice is being recognized, they then are more willing to move to consensus. Once people feel that their ideas are respected, I think that you will find a move toward cooperation. People are much more conciliatory once they feel they've been respected. That's the threshold we need to get to: the idea of respecting different viewpoints. (from the book The NPR Interviews 1995 edited by Robert Siegel)

The majority is always sane

getting six woman to agree on something is like getting Dr. Laura to agree with Howard Stern.

Together, often by unanimous vote, the council has worked quickly to get positive results.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority.

All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion

a central task of democratic politics is to provide the institutions which will permit conflicts to take an 'agonistic' form, where the opponents are not enemies but adversaries among whom exists a conflictual consensus.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

The Law of Win/Win says, Let's not do it your way or my way; let's do it the best way.

You put five intelligent people together and they vote like an idiot.

Judgments accepted by crowds are merely judgments forced upon them and never judgments adopted after discussion.

In a crowd men always tend to the same level, and, on general questions, a vote, recorded by forty academicians is no better than that of forty water-carriers.

Ha ketten gondolják ugyanazt, az nem is hasonló; ha sokan gondolnak hasonlót, az ugyanaz.

Mankind is inherently inclined towards cooperation, Holmes said. It is how we create societies and moral consensus. We want to agree with one another, on the whole. Thus, if one of us insists a certain thing is true, and maintains his standpoint in the face of all opposition, others will eventually come around to his way of thinking.

Republicans can't always agree on where to cut spending. They certainly can't agree on what to do about entitlements. There isn't a unified foreign policy vision, and there's no consensus on immigration reform.

The reality is that the Republican Party may have unified government but is not unified enough on many major signature policy areas.

Prime ministers with full majority have behaved differently from each other. Jawaharlal Nehru was a leader who ruled by consensus while Indira Gandhi was considered more unilateral in her approach.

The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.

Let us unite on the safe and sure ground of fact and experiment, and we can never err; yet better, we can never differ.

It's very important that we unite as a party and as a country.