Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Thus he became the archetype of the Renaissance Man, an inspiration to all who believe that the “infinite works of nature,” as he put it, are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous patterns.2 His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportioned man spread-eagle inside a circle and square, known as Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

52. “I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you’re more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish.”

— Walter Isaacson

53. “A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”46.”

— Walter Isaacson

54. “Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase.”

— Walter Isaacson

55. “A person “at rest” on the equator is actually spinning with the earth’s rotation at 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting with the earth around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour.”

— Walter Isaacson

56. “You always have to keep pushing to innovate.”

— Walter Isaacson

57. “Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

59. “History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.”

— Walter Isaacson

60. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

— Walter Isaacson

61. “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

62. “Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect.”

— Walter Isaacson

63. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

66. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

68. “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

69. “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

— Walter Isaacson

70. “We have reason to believe that Elon is retarded.”

— Walter Isaacson

71. “Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.”

— Walter Isaacson

72. “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

73. “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

74. “Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”

— Walter Isaacson

75. “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

76. “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

77. “1956 conference at Dartmouth organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, where the field of artificial intelligence was launched.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

79. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

83. “Sea curioso, infatigablemente curioso.”

— Walter Isaacson

84. “When you see a beautiful woman, what do you feel?” Wayne replied, “It’s like when you look at a beautiful horse. You can appreciate it, but you don’t want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it is.” Wayne said that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him.”

— Walter Isaacson

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

88. “Good authors copy, great artists steal”-Picassco.”

— Walter Isaacson

89. “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

90. “Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.”

— Walter Isaacson

91. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

93. “You’re better off to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

100. “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