If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.
Interpretation
Understanding comes through the process of transformation.
This quote by Kurt Lewin emphasizes that to genuinely comprehend any concept or phenomenon, one must engage in the act of changing it. Change requires active involvement and experimentation, which deepens understanding and insight beyond mere observation.
In practice
In a workshop focused on innovation, one might say, 'As Kurt Lewin once said, if you want to truly understand a process, try changing it.'
The American culture ideal of the "self-made-man," of everyone "standing on his own feet" seemed as tragic a picture as the initiative-destroying dependence on a benevolent despot. He felt and perceived clearly that we all need continuous help from each other, and that this type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to maturity of individual and group functioning.
The history of acceptance of new theories frequently shows the following steps: At first the new idea is treated as pure nonsense, not worth looking at. Then comes a time when a multitude of contradictory objections are raised, such as: the new theory is too fancy, or merely a new terminology; it is not fruitful, or simply wrong. Finally a state is reached when everyone seems to claim that he had always followed this theory. This usually marks the last state before general acceptance.
Learning is more effective when it is an active rather than a passive process.
Fortunately I experienced Max Wertheimer's teaching in Berlin and collaborated for over a decade with Wolfgang Köhler. I need not emphasize my debts to these outstanding personalities. The fundamental ideas of Gestalt theory are the foundation of all our investigations in the field of the will, of affection, and of the personality.
Weapons of war have no place on our streets.
There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.
The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.
People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives.
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
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