Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “Someday we may consider it unethical not to use germline editing to alleviate human suffering.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

457. “Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

460. “Reality is unforgiving.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

462. “The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.”

— Walter Isaacson

463. “Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

469. “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

470. “El viaje es la recompensa.”

— Walter Isaacson

471. “Search the phrase “the man who invented” on Amazon and you get 1,860 book results. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how today’s technology revolution was fashioned.”

— Walter Isaacson

472. “The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two.”

— Walter Isaacson

473. “Stoop, young man, stoop – as you go through this world – and you’ll miss many hard thumps.”

— Walter Isaacson

474. “Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,” Einstein noted. A version of this philosophy, sometimes called positivism, denied the validity of any concepts that went beyond descriptions of phenomena that we directly experience.”

— Walter Isaacson

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

478. “As an object approaches the speed of light, its apparent mass also increases. Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration still holds, but as the apparent mass increases, more and more force will produce less and less acceleration. There is no way to apply enough force to push even a pebble faster than the speed of light. That’s the ultimate speed limit of the universe, and no particle or piece of information can go faster than that, according to Einstein’s theory.”

— Walter Isaacson

479. “Adolf Hitler polled highest as the “greatest living person.” Albert Einstein was second.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

481. “It is 1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.”

— Walter Isaacson

482. “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

483. “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

484. “Knowing when to stand firm on principle or when to find common ground with your fellow citizens is the most important, and also the most difficult, activity in a democracy. There’s no simple formula for it. That is why it is so useful to have narratives...”

— Walter Isaacson

485. “Nature is beautiful.”

— Walter Isaacson

486. “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

487. “The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter.”

— Walter Isaacson

488. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

— Walter Isaacson

489. “In his Apple office, 1982: Asked if he wanted to do market research, he said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

— Walter Isaacson

490. “The Internet and the personal computer were both born in the 1970s, but they grew up apart from one another.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

492. “His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor.”

— Walter Isaacson

493. “At the age of 31, he had five children to raise, a trade to tend, and a shop to keep. He needed a robust new wife, and he needed her quickly.”

— Walter Isaacson

494. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

496. “A program called SNDMSG allowed a user of a big central computer to send a message to the personal folder of another user who was sharing the same computer.”

— Walter Isaacson

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

500. “When the fermentation is over and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those that drink it.”41 Franklin was wrong, sadly wrong, about the French Revolution, though he would not live long enough to learn it. Le Veillard would soon lose his life to the guillotine. So would Lavoisier the chemist, who had worked with him on the Mesmer investigation. Condorcet, the economist who had accompanied.”

— Walter Isaacson