Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

114. “The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.”

— Walter Isaacson

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

120. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

122. “Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny,” he warned the Russian scientists. “The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen.”27.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

124. “He who is abandoned is an abandoner.”

— Walter Isaacson

125. “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

126. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” he said. ” He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ” Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”

— Walter Isaacson

127. “Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.”

— Walter Isaacson

128. “In 1958 a Cornell professor, Frank Rosenblatt, attempted to do this by devising a mathematical approach for creating an artificial neural network like that of the brain, which he called a Perceptron.”

— Walter Isaacson

129. “If there is no love, what then?”2.”

— Walter Isaacson

130. “Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going,” he wrote in 1510. “Practice must always be founded on sound theory.”11.”

— Walter Isaacson

131. “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

132. “I think when you’re looking for people to interview, you want to make it fair and honest. You’re not just bringing people on so you can beat them up or, you know, make fools out of them or something.”

— Walter Isaacson

133. “For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

135. “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

136. “A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.”

— Walter Isaacson

137. “I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company.”

— Walter Isaacson

138. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth.”

— Walter Isaacson

139. “Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.”

— Walter Isaacson

140. “I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said, “at least for me.”

— Walter Isaacson

141. “Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is no more.”

— Walter Isaacson

142. “Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.”

— Walter Isaacson

143. “He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people,” Kissinger once said of Rockefeller. “I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.”

— Walter Isaacson

144. “Religion was at it’s best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith, rather than living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s a great mystery.”

— Walter Isaacson

145. “I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.”

— Walter Isaacson

146. “If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake,” he said. “Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister.” Freedom was a foundation for creativity.”

— Walter Isaacson

147. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.”

— Walter Isaacson

148. “If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.”

— Walter Isaacson

149. “Lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business. You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.”

— Walter Isaacson

150. “In notes for his treatise on painting, Leonardo recommended to young artists this practice of walking around town, finding people to use as models, and recording the most interesting ones in a portable notebook: “Take a note of them with slight strokes in a little book which you should always carry with you,” he wrote. “The positions of the people are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, which is why you should keep these sketches as your guides.”22.”

— Walter Isaacson