Selected Mary Parker Follett Quotations
• To free the energies of the human spirit is the high potentiality of all human association.
• 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.
• The study of human relations in business and the study of the technology of operating are bound up together.
• We can never wholly separate the human from the mechanical side.
• It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power.
• Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.
• I do not think we shall ever get rid of power-over; I do think we should try to reduce it.
• I do not think that power can be delegated because I believe that genuine power is capacity.
• Do we not see now that while there are many ways of gaining an external, an arbitrary power —- through brute strength, through manipulation, through diplomacy —- genuine power is always that which inheres in the situation?
• Power is not a pre-existing thing which can be handed out to someone, or wrenched from someone.
• In social relations power is a centripedial self-developing. Power is the legitimate, the inevitable, outcome of the life-process. We can always test the validity of power by asking whether it is integral to the process or outside the process.
• [T]he aim of every form of organization, should be not to share power, but to increase power, to seek the methods by which power can be increased in all.
• A genuine interweaving or interpenetrating by changing both sides creates new situations.
• We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by "either-or." There is often the possibility of something better than either of two given alternatives.
• Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is the depth and breath of true relation. I am an individual not as far as I am apart, but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is nonrelation.
• We cannot, however, mould our lives each by himself; but within every individual is the power of joining himself fundamentally and vitally to other lives, and out of this vital union comes the creative power. Revelation, if we want it to be continuous, must be through the community bond. No individual can change the disorder and iniquity of this world. No chaotic mass of men and women can do it. Conscious group creation is to be the social and political force of the future.
• We do not need to swing forever between the individual and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals, but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a crowd. One group creates me, another group brings into appearance the multiple sides of me.
• We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through the group.
