Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Let’s crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books.”

— Walter Isaacson

52. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

54. “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

55. “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

56. “1956 conference at Dartmouth organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, where the field of artificial intelligence was launched.”

— Walter Isaacson

57. “Innovation requires a reality distortion field.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

62. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

65. “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him – the United States government,” Einstein said.”

— Walter Isaacson

66. “Throughout human history, we have been subjected to wave after wave of viral and bacterial plagues. The first known one was the Babylon flu epidemic around 1200 BC. The plague of Athens in 429 BC killed close to 100,000 people, the Antonine plague in the second century killed ten million, the plague of Justinian in the sixth century killed fifty million, and the Black Death of the fourteenth century took almost 200 million lives, close to half of Europe’s population.”

— Walter Isaacson

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it – to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”

— Walter Isaacson

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Besides, I believe that older people who have scarcely anything to lose ought to be willing to speak out in behalf of those who are young and are subject to much greater restraint.”

— Walter Isaacson

91. “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

— Walter Isaacson

92. “The sexual act of coitus and the body parts employed for it are so repulsive that, if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornment of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.”7.”

— Walter Isaacson

93. “Human ingenuity,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose Vitruvian Man became the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and science, “will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.”

— Walter Isaacson

94. “There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.”

— Walter Isaacson

95. “In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him.”

— Walter Isaacson

96. “Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage.”

— Walter Isaacson

97. “Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.”

— Walter Isaacson

98. “Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.”

— Walter Isaacson

99. “Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect.”

— Walter Isaacson

100. “So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.”

— Walter Isaacson