A Quote by Forbes Burnham

Consensus is something you have if you cannot have agreement. — © Forbes Burnham
Consensus is something you have if you cannot have agreement.
To me consensus seems to be - 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"?
Harmony is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees.
Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.
Fashion is a social agreement. the result of a consensus of a large group of people.
I think my faith as a Muslim is very important. One of the core values is that you are always trying to build consensus. So when it comes to figuring out if something is permissible or not in Islam, it's usually a discussion, and people have to come to a consensus in order for something to be approved.
Anything that is missing in the implementation of the Minsk Agreement is - without any exception - up to the Kiev central government of Ukraine. You cannot demand something of Moscow that, in fact, the rulers in Kiev have to deliver. The most important aspect is the constitutional reform, Point 11 of the Minsk Agreement.
There has to be a national consensus. We cannot legislate without overwhelming national consensus that religious and communal groups should be totally banned from politics.
There's no "agreement." The president Donald Trump and the chief of staff called me from Air Force One today to discuss what was discussed - and it was a discussion, not an agreement or negotiation. We need border security and enforcement as part of any agreement. I think that's something the Democrats are beginning to understand.
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
I have this idea of a Taiwan Consensus, which means people in Taiwan have to get together and form a consensus of their own and that they turn around to talk to the Chinese to form a cross-strait consensus so we can build a relationship on that consensus. And in my view, that is the right order to do things.
There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.
Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with 'the world'; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.
When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.’ Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd.
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
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