Since she has retired from the world stage, I occasionally enjoy digging up some of my favorite nuggets from Margaret Thatcher, one of my heroes. This is from a 1981 speech:
For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word “consensus”. 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’?
