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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

454. “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

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. “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

457. “Brief is this existence, as a fleeting visit in a strange house,” he said. “The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.”2 He.”

— 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. “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

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. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

471. “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

472. “Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions of their own and become a threat to humans?”

— Walter Isaacson

473. “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

474. “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar.”

— Walter Isaacson

475. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

477. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— 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. “When we ascribe credit for an invention, determining who should be most noted by history, one criterion is looking at whose contributions turned out to have the most influence.”

— Walter Isaacson

494. “Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. “I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,” he says. “And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.”

— Walter Isaacson

495. “Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell.”

— Walter Isaacson

496. “Basic research leads to new knowledge,” Bush wrote. “It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn.”

— Walter Isaacson

497. “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

498. “Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”

— Walter Isaacson

499. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson