Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.”

— Walter Isaacson

452. “Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.” Unfortunately.”

— Walter Isaacson

453. “Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength,” Kissinger wrote. That would also become one of Kissinger’s guiding principles.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

455. “One of Job’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

456. “Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere. Historians.”

— Walter Isaacson

457. “The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics.”

— Walter Isaacson

458. “Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life.”

— Walter Isaacson

459. “In explaining the amazing mechanisms of life, little things matter. And very little things matter a lot.”

— Walter Isaacson

460. “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

461. “After you interact with Ginevra de’ Benci long enough, what at first seem like a vacant face and distant stare begin to appear suffused with a haunting tinge of emotion. She seems pensive and ruminating, perhaps about her marriage or the departure of Bembo, or because of some deeper mystery. Her life was sad; she was sickly and remained childless. But she also had an inner intensity. She wrote poetry, one line of which survives: “I ask your forgiveness; I am a mountain tiger.”

— Walter Isaacson

462. “Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak.”

— Walter Isaacson

463. “Gracias started buying more troubled companies. He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” It was a guiding principle that Musk would make his own.”

— Walter Isaacson

464. “Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a part of him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s president. So they launched a search for someone from the outside.”

— Walter Isaacson

465. “Leaders aren’t just the few famous people who dominate the news or find their place in history books. They don’t always represent the majority. They aren’t always popular. They don’t always win, and they aren’t always remembered. Leaders such as Pauli Murray, brave and obscure men and women who act on their convictions even though they fail time and time again, sometimes change the course of history.”

— Walter Isaacson

466. “The metaphor, though obvious, is too good to resist: Franklin, by nature, liked to find ingenious ways to calm turbulent waters. But during his time as a diplomat in England, this instinct would fail him.”

— Walter Isaacson

467. “Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex.”

— Walter Isaacson

468. “His comparisons between man-made machinery and the handiwork of nature produced in him a deep reverence for the latter. “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions,” he wrote, “it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”15.”

— Walter Isaacson

469. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.”

— Walter Isaacson

470. “His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.” Markkula.”

— Walter Isaacson

471. “The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called “Toy Story.”

— Walter Isaacson

472. “We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone,” Jobs declared in an email to a customer. “Folks who want porn can buy an Android.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

474. “Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation.”

— Walter Isaacson

475. “La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci.31.”

— Walter Isaacson

476. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential,” he said. “To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

478. “The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.”

— Walter Isaacson

479. “Eisenhower defined the ability to nurture optimism and elicit cooperation as the essence of leadership. He believed that such ability was not an innate but an acquired characteristic, the acquisition of which resulted from serious psychological study. “The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men,” he wrote to his son in 1943.”

— Walter Isaacson

480. “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9.”

— Walter Isaacson

481. “Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!”

— Walter Isaacson

482. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

— Walter Isaacson

483. “One evening, Eberhard was driving his Roadster around Silicon Valley when a kid in a super-pimped Audi pulled up beside him at a stoplight and revved his engine to challenge him to a drag. When the light changed, Eberhard left him in the dust. The same thing happened at the next two lights. Finally the kid rolled down his window and asked Eberhard what he was driving. “It’s electric,” Eberhard said. “There’s no way you can beat it.”

— Walter Isaacson

484. “His argument was that a great engineer would be remembered only if he teamed with a great marketer, and this required him to commit his designs to the partnership.”

— Walter Isaacson

485. “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

486. “As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines “cooperate in making decisions.” In other words, they would augment each other. “Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.”

— Walter Isaacson

487. “This phenomenon, called time dilation, leads to what is known as the twin paradox.”

— Walter Isaacson

488. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

490. “Reality is unforgiving.”

— Walter Isaacson

491. “People like you and me never grow old,” he wrote a friend later in life. “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”

— Walter Isaacson

492. “Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe.”

— Walter Isaacson

493. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

496. “Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines.”

— Walter Isaacson

497. “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

498. “Every reasonable person must strive to promote moderation and a more objective judgment.”3.”

— Walter Isaacson

499. “Harvard professor I. Bernard Cohen has pronounced, “Franklin’s law of conservation of charge must be considered to be of the same fundamental importance to physical science as Newton’s law of conservation of momentum.”

— Walter Isaacson

500. “The important thing with Elon,” he says, “is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his.”

— Walter Isaacson