“The impulse to understand, and not merely to know and to act, is an impulse characteristic of man and apparently not shared by other animals. I am not concerned here with the origin and nature of this impulse, but with its implications that there is something to be understood and that understanding is not reducible to knowledge and action.”

— John G. Bennett

J.G. Bennett (1963) " General Systematics http://www.systematics.org/journal/vol1-1/GeneralSystematics.htm" in: Systematics] (1963) Vol 1., no 1. p. 5; cited on The Primer Project on isss.org, 2007.07.03

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John G. Bennett 13

British mathematician and author 1897–1974

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 24.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Source: (1932), p.29

“For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.... the power of evolution.
But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language... Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Caroline Tisdall, 1979, p. 210; as cited in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 180
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