Mary Parker Follett Quotes

When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there's nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy.

We can have more democracy and openness and still be efficient.

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness.

Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better

Local self-government…is the life-blood of liberty.

Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.

I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn't be frightened of creating themselves - that's why I make things very open, with things for people to do.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

The right of self-government does not comprehend the government of others.

We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government.

See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Democracy is good for everybody.

Trust the people -- that is the crucial lesson of history.

Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination.

Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

We can't have self-government without the self-confidence that is at the root of it.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

May it be to the world... to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

In the end, democratic societies are stronger and more resilient than any autocracy. And more adaptable too.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.

Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of countries can do without governing,every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will,can such a form of so-called Government continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there.