"If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision"
About this Quote
A scientist who helped midwife the atomic age is warning you about the oldest explosive material on earth: secondhand certainty. Szilard’s line reads like a mild epistemology lesson, but the intent is sharper. “If one knows only what one is told” targets passive knowledge - information received without friction, without verification, without the discomfort of competing accounts. It’s a critique of deference disguised as advice.
The subtext is about power. Being “told” is never neutral; it implies an authority selecting what counts as reality. Szilard is pointing to the way institutions (governments, militaries, even scientific hierarchies) can manufacture consensus by narrowing the range of what people are allowed to know. A “well-balanced decision” isn’t just a matter of temperament; it requires access to enough raw material - dissenting evidence, context, uncertainty - to keep you from being steered.
Context does a lot of work here. Szilard wasn’t speaking from an armchair. He saw how technical expertise could be drafted into national narratives, how secrecy could be justified as necessity, and how catastrophic outcomes could follow from decisions made inside information bottlenecks. For someone who lobbied leaders about nuclear weapons and later advocated restraint, “well-balanced” reads as an ethical demand, not a personality trait.
The sentence is engineered like a proof: a conditional that corners the reader into admitting a vulnerability. It doesn’t ask you to distrust everything; it asks you to earn belief. That’s a scientist’s skepticism repurposed as civic survival.
The subtext is about power. Being “told” is never neutral; it implies an authority selecting what counts as reality. Szilard is pointing to the way institutions (governments, militaries, even scientific hierarchies) can manufacture consensus by narrowing the range of what people are allowed to know. A “well-balanced decision” isn’t just a matter of temperament; it requires access to enough raw material - dissenting evidence, context, uncertainty - to keep you from being steered.
Context does a lot of work here. Szilard wasn’t speaking from an armchair. He saw how technical expertise could be drafted into national narratives, how secrecy could be justified as necessity, and how catastrophic outcomes could follow from decisions made inside information bottlenecks. For someone who lobbied leaders about nuclear weapons and later advocated restraint, “well-balanced” reads as an ethical demand, not a personality trait.
The sentence is engineered like a proof: a conditional that corners the reader into admitting a vulnerability. It doesn’t ask you to distrust everything; it asks you to earn belief. That’s a scientist’s skepticism repurposed as civic survival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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