Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

114. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

117. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

132. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

134. “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

135. “Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.”

— Walter Isaacson

136. “Ever since Apple’s first brochure proclaimed “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “It takes a lot of hard word,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

— Walter Isaacson

137. “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

138. “More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren’t relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.”

— Walter Isaacson

139. “I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it’s a dumb word, but mental processing power – I’ve watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom.”

— Walter Isaacson

140. “If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.”

— Walter Isaacson

141. “I was originally supposed to become an engineer,” he later wrote a friend, “but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. Thinking for its own sake, like music!”72.”

— Walter Isaacson

142. “Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution.”

— Walter Isaacson

143. “Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities of Dylan bootlegs,” Kottke recalled. “He was both really cool and high-tech.”

— Walter Isaacson

144. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.”

— Walter Isaacson

145. “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

146. “At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: “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

147. “That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.”

— Walter Isaacson

148. “The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain.”

— Walter Isaacson

149. “A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.”

— Walter Isaacson

150. “But when a boy was born – on February 24, 1955 – the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out.”

— Walter Isaacson