• We can test our group in this way: do we come together to register the results of individual thought, to compare the results of individual thought in order to make selections therefrom, or do we come together to create a common idea? Whenever we have a real group something new is actually created. We can now see therefore that the object of group life is not to find the best individual thought, but the collective thought. A committee meeting isn't like a prize show aimed at calling out the best each can possibly produce and then the prize (the vote) awarded to the best of all these individual opinions. The object of a conference is not to get a lot of different ideas, as is often thought, but just the opposite -- to get at one idea. There is nothing rigid or fixed about thoughts, they are entirely plastic, and ready to yield themselves completely to their master -- the group spirit.
• When the conditions for collective thinking are more or less fulfilled, then the expansion of life will begin. Through my group I learn the secret of wholeness.
• We can often measure our progress by watching the nature of our conflicts. Social progress is in this respect like individual progress; we become spiritually more and more developed as our conflicts rise to higher levels.
• Men descend to meet? This is not my experience. The laissez-aller which people allow themselves when alone disappears when they meet. Then they pull themselves together and give one another of their best. We see this again and again. Sometimes the idea of the group stands quite visibly before us as one which none of us is quite living up to by himself. We feel it there, an impalpable, substantial thing in our midst. It raises us to the nth power of action, it fires our minds and glows in our hearts and fulfils and actuates itself no less, but rather on this very account, because it has been generated only by our being together.
• The most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualised.
• If leadership does not mean coercion in any form, if it does not mean controlling, protecting or exploiting, what does it mean? It means, I think, freeing. The greatest service the teacher can render the student is to increase his freedom -- his free range of activity and thought and his power of control.
• We want worked out a relation between leaders and led which will give to each the opportunity to make creative contributions to the situation.
• The best leader knows how to make his followers actually feel power themselves, not merely acknowledge his power.
• The joint responsibility of management and labor is an interpenetrating responsibility, and is utterly different from responsibility divided into sections, management having some and labor some.
• Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, or absorbed.
• Instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it because it is different and through its difference will make a richer content of 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.
• A friendship based on likenesses and agreements alone is a superficial matter enough. The deep and lasting friendship is one capable of recognizing and dealing with all the fundamental differences that must exist between any two individuals, one capable therefore of such an enrichment of our personalities that together we shall mount to new heights of understanding and endeavor.
• It is clear then that we do not go to our group -- trade-union, city council, college faculty -- to be passive and learn, and we do not go to push through something we have already decided we want. Each must discover and contribute that which distinguishes him from others, his difference. The only use for my difference is to join it with other differences. The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.
• I learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by living my life with my friends and learning by experience the obligations friendship demands.
• We integrate our experience, and then the richer human being that we are goes into the new experience; again we give ourself and always by giving rise above the old self.
• Experience may be hard, but we claim its gifts because they are real, even though our feet bleed on its stones.
