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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

11. “Throughout human history, we have been subjected to wave after wave of viral and bacterial plagues. The first known one was the Babylon flu epidemic around 1200 BC. The plague of Athens in 429 BC killed close to 100,000 people, the Antonine plague in the second century killed ten million, the plague of Justinian in the sixth century killed fifty million, and the Black Death of the fourteenth century took almost 200 million lives, close to half of Europe’s population.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

15. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

— Walter Isaacson

16. “Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Bezos was methodical. His motto was gradatim ferociter, or “Step by step, ferociously.”

— Walter Isaacson

23. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. – Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

25. “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him – the United States government,” Einstein said.”

— Walter Isaacson

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

30. “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

31. “Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

34. “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

35. “Form follows emotion.”

— Walter Isaacson

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it – to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”

— Walter Isaacson

39. “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

41. “The sexual act of coitus and the body parts employed for it are so repulsive that, if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornment of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.”7.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

50. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

— Walter Isaacson