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We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
--
A Cloudy Crystal Ball -- Visions of the Future (PDF) (1992-07-16). Retrieved on 2008-06-04. (Presentation given at the 24th Internet Engineering Task Force)
--
frequently cited as the motto of the Internet engineering community

 

David D. Clark

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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.
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. 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.

 

Michael Crichton

 

Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.

 

Germaine Greer

 

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

 

Martin Luther King

 

We have had good and bad Presidents, and it is a consoling reflection that the American Nation possesses such elements of prosperity that the bad Presidents cannot destroy it, and have been able to do no more than slightly to retard the public's advancement.

 

Henry Clay

 

When kings the sword of justice first lay down,
They are no kings, though they possess the crown.
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.

 

Daniel Defoe