Mary Parker Follett - The new state (1918)

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Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.

Mary Parker Follett
We are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations... Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within nations.

Mary Parker Follett
Many people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but Few have made me want to do something..

Mary Parker Follett
Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals...the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.

Mary Parker Follett
The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual activity of their citizens.

Mary Parker Follett
Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought.

Mary Parker Follett
We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel intimate with my enemies.

Mary Parker Follett
The method of moral hygiene as of physical hygiene is social cooperation. We do not walk into the Kingdom of Heaven one by one.

Mary Parker Follett
Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole — such is the law of growth. The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life — the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation, the at-onement.

Mary Parker Follett
We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.

Mary Parker Follett
It is a mistake to think that social progress is to depend upon anything happening to the working people: some say that they are to be given more material goods and all will be well; some think they are to be given more "education" and the world will be saved. It is equally a mistake to think that what we need is the conversion to "unselfishness" of the capitalist class.

Mary Parker Follett
It is not opposition but indifference which separates men.

Mary Parker Follett
Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

Mary Parker Follett
The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.

Mary Parker Follett
In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony. We want the single voice but not the single note; that is the secret of the group.

Mary Parker Follett
A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.

Mary Parker Follett
The group process contains the secret of collective life, it is the key to democracy, it is the master lesson for every individual to learn, it is our chief hope or the political, the social, the international life of the future.

Mary Parker Follett
I am free when I am functioning here in time and space as the creative will.... freedom by our definition is obedience to the law of one's nature.

Mary Parker Follett