"Pronouncement of experts to the effect that something cannot be done has always irritated me"
About this Quote
Szilard’s irritation isn’t just impatience with naysayers; it’s a deliberate refusal to let credentialed confidence set the boundaries of reality. “Pronouncement” is doing quiet damage here. It suggests a verdict delivered from on high, less hypothesis than decree. “Experts” aren’t wrong by definition, but they’re implicated as a class that can mistake authority for evidence, consensus for possibility. The target isn’t knowledge; it’s the institutional posture that polices imagination.
The subtext is intensely scientific: progress depends on treating “cannot” as provisional. In research, impossibility claims age badly because they’re often shorthand for “we don’t have the tools,” “we haven’t tried that angle,” or “it violates what we currently think we know.” Szilard is defending the heretic’s stance that the map is not the territory, and that the job of an inventive mind is to test the borders, not salute them.
Context sharpens the edge. Szilard lived through the era when “impossible” became a dangerously flexible word: chain reactions, atomic weapons, and the whole moral vertigo of turning theoretical physics into geopolitics. He helped push the Manhattan Project into existence, then spent the rest of his life wrestling with what that proof-of-possibility unleashed. Read that way, the line is both swagger and warning: experts can be wrong about what can be done, and being right about possibility doesn’t absolve you from responsibility. It’s an antidote to complacency, not a license for recklessness.
The subtext is intensely scientific: progress depends on treating “cannot” as provisional. In research, impossibility claims age badly because they’re often shorthand for “we don’t have the tools,” “we haven’t tried that angle,” or “it violates what we currently think we know.” Szilard is defending the heretic’s stance that the map is not the territory, and that the job of an inventive mind is to test the borders, not salute them.
Context sharpens the edge. Szilard lived through the era when “impossible” became a dangerously flexible word: chain reactions, atomic weapons, and the whole moral vertigo of turning theoretical physics into geopolitics. He helped push the Manhattan Project into existence, then spent the rest of his life wrestling with what that proof-of-possibility unleashed. Read that way, the line is both swagger and warning: experts can be wrong about what can be done, and being right about possibility doesn’t absolve you from responsibility. It’s an antidote to complacency, not a license for recklessness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Never Give Up |
|---|---|
| Source | Leo Szilard — Wikiquote entry: "The pronouncement of experts to the effect that something cannot be done has always irritated me." |
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