Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.”

— Walter Isaacson

452. “He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls “phoning in rich,” meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor.”

— Walter Isaacson

453. “Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”

— Walter Isaacson

454. “He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.”

— Walter Isaacson

455. “Causality expresses the pattern which the mind imposes on a sequence of events in order to make their appearance comprehensible.”

— Walter Isaacson

456. “Then I would explain, it was no use trying to learn math unless they could communicate it with other people.”4.”

— Walter Isaacson

457. “Following the lead of other phone phreaks such as Captain Crunch, they gave themselves handles. Wozniak became “Berkeley Blue,” Jobs was “Oaf Tobark.” They took the.”

— Walter Isaacson

458. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.”

— Walter Isaacson

459. “The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”

— Walter Isaacson

460. “Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.”

— Walter Isaacson

461. “Apple was destined to be: poetry connected to engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design that’s bold and simple.”

— Walter Isaacson

462. “He was still Leonardo, always pursuing a curiosity, less passionate about tying up loose ends.”

— Walter Isaacson

463. “Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.”

— Walter Isaacson

464. “I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that. It’s guaranteed to work.”

— Walter Isaacson

465. “You Say You Want a Revolution: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, Paul Otellini. All Things.”

— Walter Isaacson

466. “The central area of the retina, known as the fovea, is best at seeing color and small details; the area surrounding the fovea is best at picking up shadows and shadings of black and white. When we look at an object straight on, it appears sharper. When we look at it peripherally, glimpsing it out of the corner of our eye, it is a bit blurred, as if it were farther away.”

— Walter Isaacson

467. “As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to “the difference personalities make”.”

— Walter Isaacson

468. “At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

— Walter Isaacson

469. “The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.”

— Walter Isaacson

470. “I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.”

— Walter Isaacson

471. “We must remember that this is a very small star,” he responded, “and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy.”73.”

— Walter Isaacson

472. “Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonardo occasionally made sketches of the technique in his notebooks.”

— Walter Isaacson

473. “If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.” This.”

— Walter Isaacson

474. “While the men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made their way home alone through a very cold February night.”

— Walter Isaacson

475. “But even when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small.”

— Walter Isaacson

476. “Oddest of all, there is this entry: “Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men.”10 We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do.”

— Walter Isaacson

477. “Reality is unforgiving.”

— Walter Isaacson

478. “Einstein had a similar conversation with his friend in Prague, Philipp Frank. “A new fashion has arisen in physics,” Einstein complained, which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality. “But the fashion you speak of,” Frank protested, “was invented by you in 1905!” Replied Einstein: “A good joke should not be repeated too often.”61 The.”

— Walter Isaacson

479. “V – the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king – begins.”

— Walter Isaacson

480. “Ginevra de Benci was made by a young artist with astonishing skills of observation. The Mona Lisa is the work of a man who had used those skills to immerse himself in a lifetime of intellectual passions.”

— Walter Isaacson

481. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.”

— Walter Isaacson

482. “So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”

— Walter Isaacson

483. “For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer.”

— Walter Isaacson

484. “Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training.”

— Walter Isaacson

485. “In fact, neither explanation does Jobs and Apple justice. As the case of the forgotten Iowa inventor John Atanasoff shows, conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution. Jobs and his team took Xerox’s ideas, improved them, implemented them, and marketed them.”

— Walter Isaacson

486. “Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.”

— Walter Isaacson

487. “Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the “Menagerie” episodes of Star Trek, “in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force.” He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.”

— Walter Isaacson

488. “He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean.”

— Walter Isaacson

489. “In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.”

— Walter Isaacson

490. “I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.”

— Walter Isaacson

491. “The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.”

— Walter Isaacson

492. “Micro-Soft BASIC: Paul Allen wrote the non-runtime stuff. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Monte Davidoff wrote the math package.”

— Walter Isaacson

493. “We have reason to believe that Elon is retarded.”

— Walter Isaacson

494. “He never trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom.”

— Walter Isaacson

495. “When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.”

— Walter Isaacson

496. “The same traits that make them inventive, such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along.”

— Walter Isaacson

497. “The Defiant Ones and 48 Hours, in which two characters with different attitudes are thrown together and have to bond.”

— Walter Isaacson

498. “One of the assistants who lived in Leonardo’s household at the time was a technician and locksmith named Giulio Tedesco, known as Jules the German, who returned to Germany around 1499 and spread Leonardo’s idea there. The wheellock came into use in Italy and Germany around that time and proved to be influential in facilitating both warfare and the personal use of guns.18.”

— Walter Isaacson

499. “Tim Cook When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and produced the “Think Different” ads and the iMac in his first year, it confirmed what most people already knew: that he could be creative and a visionary. He had shown that during his first round at Apple. What was less clear was whether he could run a company. He had definitely not shown that during his first round.”

— Walter Isaacson

500. “Once she calmed down, she told Jobs that he had a full sister, Mona Simpson, who was then an aspiring novelist.”

— Walter Isaacson