Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I keep thinking about all the time away from my family this will cause, and the time away from the other family at Pixar,” Jobs said. “But the only reason I want to do it is that the world will be a better place with Apple in it.”

— Walter Isaacson

452. “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

453. “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

454. “The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

456. “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

457. “Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?”

— Walter Isaacson

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.”

— Walter Isaacson

468. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

470. “When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato “Leonardo’s famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form.”

— Walter Isaacson

471. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

477. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

479. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

481. “Sealing the Microsoft deal by phone with Gates: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.”

— Walter Isaacson

482. “Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.”

— Walter Isaacson

483. “Franklin’s scientific achievements placed him in the pantheon with Newton. Franklin’s experiments, he wrote in 1941, “afforded a basis for the explanation for all the known phenomena of electricity.”16 Franklin.”

— Walter Isaacson

484. “New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce.”

— Walter Isaacson

485. “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

486. “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

487. “The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

489. “Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple II DOS program in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. “You’re just wasting your time with that!” Jobs replied. “Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re going to start on it now!” With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord to Hertzfeld’s Apple II, causing the code he was working on to vanish.”

— Walter Isaacson

490. “So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”

— Walter Isaacson

491. “Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

— Walter Isaacson

492. “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

493. “One person who encouraged the denizens of the counterculture.”

— Walter Isaacson

494. “Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.”

— Walter Isaacson

495. “Ive grew up in Chingford, a town on the northeast edge of London. His father was a silversmith who taught at the local college. “He’s a fantastic craftsman,” Ive recalled. “His Christmas gift to me would be one day of his time in his college workshop, during the Christmas break when no one else was there, helping me make whatever I dreamed up.”

— Walter Isaacson

496. “While a student in McCollum’s class, Jobs became friends with a graduate who was the teacher’s all- time favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs, was almost five years older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable about electronics. But emotionally and socially he was still a high school geek.”

— Walter Isaacson

497. “The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win.”

— Walter Isaacson

498. “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

499. “Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did.”

— Walter Isaacson

500. “The beauty of nature and the joy that comes from unstructured human engagement is a powerful combination.”

— Walter Isaacson