Recognize the relationships between things and the laws which govern men's actions, so that you know what you are doing.
Begin with the event, before deciding what it means.
BY OTHERS◆Friday, January 1, 1993
by Leo Szilard
The fragments of the stone tablets that Szilard picked up are clearly different in both substance and tone from those which Moses brought down - softer, not nearly so blunt and unequivocal.
tags: Szilard, physics, ethics, commandments, Manhattan Project, wisdom
Lead your life with a gentle hand and be ready to depart whenever you are called.
A physicist’s commandments should not be tablets. They should be instruments.
Szilard’s ten rules are soft where commandments are usually hard: they distrust certainty, appetite, performance, possession, and the fantasy that a good act is justified only by winning. They ask for something more difficult than obedience - alertness.
A working ethics for dangerous intelligence
The Szilard Decalogue
Ten small instruments for seeing consequences, resisting appetite, speaking plainly, leaving periodically, and handling life without clutching it.
Not laws carved in stone. Experiments to run on oneself.
Direct your deeds to a worthy goal, but do not ask if they will achieve the goal; let them be models and examples rather than means to an end.
MODEL / NOT GUARANTEE
Treat the next person as though the institution were already kind.
Its worth does not wait for the result.Speak to all others as you do to yourself, without regard to the effect you make, so that you do not expel them from your world and in your isolation lose sight of the meaning of life and the perfection of the creation.
THE AUDIENCE
Your words appear here.
Do not destroy what you cannot create.
Touch no dish unless you are hungry.
Enough appetite to choose carefully.
The German word also permits a legal pun: do not go to court unless hungry.Do not desire what you cannot have.
Choose a desire to release it. The possible action remains.
Do not lie without need.
1/4You praise work you did not read because its author can help your career.
Honor children. Listen to their words with reverence and speak to them with endless love.
Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not prevent you from being what you have become.
Work. Accumulate craft without confusing motion for direction.
WORKING ORBIT 1 OF 6Lead your life with a gentle hand and be ready to depart whenever you are called.
Leave the room without needing the last word.
Touch the circle to loosen your grip.