"Democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. 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. Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of his complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization."
~Mary Parker Follett

"The training for the new democracy must be from the cradle - through nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired only through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life."
~Mary Park Follett

"Democracy is an infinitely including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinct for wholeness... Democracy is the self-creating process of life... projecting itself into the visible world... so that its essential oneness will declare itself."
~Mary Parker Follett, The New State (1918)

"Democracy is an infinitely including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinct for wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations." ~Mary Parker Follett