Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”

— Walter Isaacson

2. “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

— Walter Isaacson

3. “Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

4. “One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”

— Walter Isaacson

5. “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

— Walter Isaacson

6. “It’s about doing something larger than yourself. It’s about serving this world, helping others.”

— Walter Isaacson

7. “Innovation requires articulation.”

— Walter Isaacson

8. “A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.”

— Walter Isaacson

9. “If you act like you can do something, then it will work.”

— Walter Isaacson

10. “Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.”

— Walter Isaacson

11. “La mejor manera de predecir el futuro es inventarlo.”

— Walter Isaacson

12. “Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”

— Walter Isaacson

13. “Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

— Walter Isaacson

14. “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

— Walter Isaacson

15. “I think one problem we’ve had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.”

— Walter Isaacson

16. “The Ottoman Turks were about to capture Constantinople, unleashing on Italy a migration of fleeing scholars with bundles of manuscripts containing the ancient wisdom of Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, and Aristotle.”

— Walter Isaacson

17. “Customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

— Walter Isaacson

18. “I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight – Steve Jobs.”

— Walter Isaacson

19. “An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality,” he said.”

— Walter Isaacson

20. “When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.”

— Walter Isaacson

21. “What do you think of Adolf Hitler?” Einstein replied, “He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.”

— Walter Isaacson

22. “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

— Walter Isaacson

23. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know: Things led to their opposites.”

— Walter Isaacson

24. “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”

— Walter Isaacson

25. “Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

— Walter Isaacson

26. “I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”

— Walter Isaacson

27. “Form follows emotion.”

— Walter Isaacson

28. “But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.”

— Walter Isaacson

29. “Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly,” Pestalozzi wrote, and “the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated.” 58.”

— Walter Isaacson

30. “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.”

— Walter Isaacson

31. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

— Walter Isaacson

32. “After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.”

— Walter Isaacson

33. “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

— Walter Isaacson

34. “I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you’re more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish.”

— Walter Isaacson

35. “A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”46.”

— Walter Isaacson

36. “History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.”

— Walter Isaacson

37. “You always have to keep pushing to innovate.”

— Walter Isaacson

38. “Thus he became the archetype of the Renaissance Man, an inspiration to all who believe that the “infinite works of nature,” as he put it, are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous patterns.2 His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportioned man spread-eagle inside a circle and square, known as Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

39. “Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it’s the reward for being a seeker in this world.”

— Walter Isaacson

40. “First and foremost is that creativty is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.”

— Walter Isaacson

41. “Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind.”

— Walter Isaacson

42. “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

— Walter Isaacson

43. “The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.”

— Walter Isaacson

44. “Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase.”

— Walter Isaacson

45. “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

— Walter Isaacson

46. “When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.”

— Walter Isaacson

47. “I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.”

— Walter Isaacson

48. “Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations.”

— Walter Isaacson

49. “Let’s crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books.”

— Walter Isaacson

50. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

— Walter Isaacson