Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead.”

— Walter Isaacson

153. “Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: “Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.”

— Walter Isaacson

154. “He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.” Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts.”

— Walter Isaacson

155. “The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”

— Walter Isaacson

156. “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”

— Walter Isaacson

157. “I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant.”

— Walter Isaacson

158. “Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”

— Walter Isaacson

159. “He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”

— Walter Isaacson

160. “I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.”

— Walter Isaacson

161. “Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.”

— Walter Isaacson

162. “Wozniak could make one of the computers he had been sketching on.”

— Walter Isaacson

163. “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.”

— Walter Isaacson

164. “When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.”

— Walter Isaacson

165. “Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments. The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer.”

— Walter Isaacson

166. “Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.”

— Walter Isaacson

167. “The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”40.”

— Walter Isaacson

168. “This isn’t about replacing human thinking with machine thinking. Rather, in the era of cognitive systems, humans and machines will collaborate to produce better results, each bringing their own superior skills to the partnership.”

— Walter Isaacson

169. “During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.”

— Walter Isaacson

170. “Occasionally Leonardo appended a moral lesson to the entry, such as this: “The oyster, when the moon is full, opens itself wide, and when the crab looks in he throws in a stone or seaweed and the oyster cannot close again, whereby it serves for food to that crab. This is what happens to him who opens his mouth to tell his secret. He becomes the prey of the treacherous hearer.”

— Walter Isaacson

171. “Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge. Fully a third of Florence’s population was literate, the highest rate in Europe. By embracing trade, it became a center of finance and a cauldron of ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

172. “But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.”

— Walter Isaacson

173. “I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.”

— Walter Isaacson

174. “It was a sunny day, and Einstein merrily played with the telescope’s dials and instruments. Elsa came along as well, and it was explained to her that the equipment was used to determine the scope and shape of the universe. She reportedly replied, “Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”

— Walter Isaacson

175. “Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

176. “When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.” As.”

— Walter Isaacson

177. “Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he answered, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks.”

— Walter Isaacson

178. “He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.”

— Walter Isaacson

179. “When birds are descending near the ground and the head is below the tail, they lower the tail, which is spread wide open, and take short strokes with the wings; consequently, the head is raised above the tail, and the speed is checked so that the bird can alight on the ground without a shock.”9 Ever notice all that?”

— Walter Isaacson

180. “By noting that she seems to listen but not speak, Bellincioni conveyed what makes the portrait so momentous: it captures the sense of an inner mind at work. Her emotions seem to be revealed, or at least hinted at, by the look in her eyes, the enigma of her smile, and the erotic way she clutches and caresses the ermine.”

— Walter Isaacson

181. “Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players.”

— Walter Isaacson

182. “One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. “As you go about town,” he wrote in one of them, “constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows.”1 For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt.”

— Walter Isaacson

183. “One of the great pressures we’re facing in journalism now is it’s a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters.”

— Walter Isaacson

184. “When shown his office, he was asked what equipment he might need. “A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils,” he replied. “Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.”

— Walter Isaacson

185. “Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.”

— Walter Isaacson

186. “The thing that Von Neumann had, which I’ve noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem, the one crucial thing that’s important.”

— Walter Isaacson

187. “I don’t think there was enough skepticism because I think most of us kind of believed that Saddam Hussein was building biological, chemical, and perhaps even, nuclear weapons.”

— Walter Isaacson

188. “This entailed switching around by hand ENIAC’s rat’s nest of cables and resetting its switches. At first the programming seemed to be a routine, perhaps even menial task, which may have been why it was relegated to women, who back then were not encouraged to become engineers. But what the women of ENIAC soon showed, and the men later came to understand, was that the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware.”

— Walter Isaacson

189. “Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.”14.”

— Walter Isaacson

190. “The maker culture in America, ever since the days of community barn raisers and quilting bees, often involved do-it-ourselves rather than do-it-yourself.”

— Walter Isaacson

191. “Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.”

— Walter Isaacson

192. “It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”

— Walter Isaacson

193. “Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31.”

— Walter Isaacson

194. “The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.”

— Walter Isaacson

195. “While she slept, her subconscious untangled the knot that her conscious mind had been unable to.”

— Walter Isaacson

196. “Fish and guests stink after three days.”

— Walter Isaacson

197. “When you write biographies, whether it’s about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.”

— Walter Isaacson

198. “Most outside experts disagreed. “Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently,” Business Week wrote in a story headlined “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.”

— Walter Isaacson

199. “So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

— Walter Isaacson

200. “Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.”

— Walter Isaacson