(15 June 2007)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Context: Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus. And unlike science, art is not progressive. Personally, I have my doubts that science can be said to be genuinely progressive, but I'm pretty dammed certain that art is not. Which is not to say that it is not accumulative or accretionary. But the belief that sf writers are out there forecasting the future, that they have some social responsibility to do so, that's malarky, if you ask me. Writers of sf can only, at best, make educated guesses, and usually those guesses are wrong, and clumping together to form a consensus does not in any way insure against history unfolding in one of those other, unpredicted directions. People love to pick out the occasional instances where Jules Verne and William Gibson got it right; they rarely ever point fingers at their miscalls.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
Aliens Cause Global Warming (2003)
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Michael Crichton 121
American author, screenwriter, film producer 1942–2008Related quotes
Aliens Cause Global Warming (2003)
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality
Speech to the Federation of Conservative Students in Manchester (6 October 1981), quoted in The Times (7 October 1981), p. 6. Margaret Thatcher had read Heath's advance text and responded http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104712 by saying that "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".
Post-Prime Ministerial
Chen Ming-tong (2018) cited in " MAC head brushes off '1992 consensus' http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201805250028.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 25 May 2018.
“Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.”
"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" https://web.archive.org/web/20060314095859/http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/680331.000_Remaining_Awake.html, an address at the Episcopal National Cathedral, Washington D.C. (31 March 1968)
1960s
Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Introduction, p. xxvi
“Safe, sane and consensual — what do those words really mean?
Assimilation, that's what.”
Source: "Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny", p. 12
Orientamo-nos por normas geradas segundo consensos, e domínios, mete-se pelos olhos dentro que variando o domínio varia o consenso, Não deixas saída, Porque não há saída, vivemos num quarto fechados e pintamos o mundo e o universo nas paredes dele.
Source: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 267
Speech to Conservative Central Council (15 March 1986) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106348
Second term as Prime Minister
Context: Seven years ago, who would have dared forecast such a transformation of Britain. This didn't come about because of consensus. It happened because we said: this we believe, this we will do. It's called leadership.