Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it’s the reward for being a seeker in this world.”

— Walter Isaacson

52. “What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”

— Walter Isaacson

53. “First and foremost is that creativty is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.”

— Walter Isaacson

54. “Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind.”

— Walter Isaacson

55. “The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.”

— Walter Isaacson

56. “When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.”

— Walter Isaacson

57. “Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.”

— Walter Isaacson

58. “People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”

— Walter Isaacson

59. “In 1482, the year he turned thirty, Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan, where he would end up spending the next seventeen years.”

— Walter Isaacson

60. “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

— Walter Isaacson

61. “By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5 million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket calculator cost $3.62 at Walmart.”

— Walter Isaacson

62. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111.”

— Walter Isaacson

63. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

— Walter Isaacson

64. “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.”

— Walter Isaacson

65. “I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.”

— Walter Isaacson

66. “Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations.”

— Walter Isaacson

67. “Let’s crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books.”

— Walter Isaacson

68. “RNA, on the other hand, actually goes out and does real work. Instead of just sitting at home curating information, it makes real products, such as proteins.”

— Walter Isaacson

69. “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

— Walter Isaacson

70. “1956 conference at Dartmouth organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, where the field of artificial intelligence was launched.”

— Walter Isaacson

71. “An Integrated Package As Jobs walked the floor of the Personal Computer Festival, he came to the realization that Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop had been right: Personal computers should come in a complete package.”

— Walter Isaacson

72. “Innovation requires a reality distortion field.”

— Walter Isaacson

73. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

— Walter Isaacson

74. “I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.”46.”

— Walter Isaacson

75. “Painting a conventional portrait for a pushy patron did not interest him. Nor did money motivate him. He painted portraits if the subject struck his fancy, such as the Musician, or if a powerful ruler demanded it, as in the case of Ludovico with his mistresses. But he didn’t dance to the music of patrons.”

— Walter Isaacson

76. “Tim Paterson, who worked for a small firm called Seattle Computer Products.”

— Walter Isaacson

77. “Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck in their ways.”

— Walter Isaacson

78. “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more.”

— Walter Isaacson

79. “Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe. It also symbolizes an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity, value, and rational agency of humans as individuals. Inside the square and the circle we can see the essence of Leonardo da Vinci, and the essence of ourselves, standing naked at the intersection of the earthly and the cosmic.”

— Walter Isaacson

80. “People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it.”

— Walter Isaacson

81. “Given a choice of order or justice, he often said, paraphrasing Goethe, he would choose order. He had seen too clearly the consequences of disorder.”

— Walter Isaacson

82. “If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”

— Walter Isaacson

83. “Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him.”

— Walter Isaacson

84. “Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”

— Walter Isaacson

85. “I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.”

— Walter Isaacson

86. “Smart, yet unpretentious. Tough enough to stand up to him, yet Zen-like enough to rise above turmoil. Well-educated and independent, yet ready to make accommodations for him and a family. Down-to-earth, but with a touch of the ethereal. Savvy enough to know how to manage him, but secure enough to not always need to. And it wouldn’t hurt to be a beautiful, lanky blonde with an easygoing sense of humor who liked organic vegetarian food.”

— Walter Isaacson

87. “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!‘” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

— Walter Isaacson

88. “One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.”12 Leonardo mastered all three.”

— Walter Isaacson

89. “While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the “Deluge drawings” that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. “I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction,” he replied.”

— Walter Isaacson

90. “White isn’t just a neutral color. It is so pure and quiet. Bold and conspicuous and yet so inconspicuous as well.”

— Walter Isaacson

91. “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

— Walter Isaacson

92. “Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert.”

— Walter Isaacson

93. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

— Walter Isaacson

94. “Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature’s phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. “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

95. “Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.”

— Walter Isaacson

96. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”

— Walter Isaacson

97. “What Einstein was able to do was – to use a cliche – think out of the box.”

— Walter Isaacson

98. “He lies not because it’s in his interest, he lies because it’s in his nature.” It was in Jobs’s nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was warranted.”

— Walter Isaacson

99. “The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.”

— Walter Isaacson

100. “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs,” he wrote Weizmann in 1929, “then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.”

— Walter Isaacson