Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.”

— Walter Isaacson

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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.”

— Walter Isaacson

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

162. “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

163. “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.”

— Walter Isaacson

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

167. “While gambling at checkers with some shipmates, he formulated an “infallible rule,” which was that “if two persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves money most shall lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.” The rule, he decided, applied to other battles; a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.”

— Walter Isaacson

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

171. “I’ve asked Jobs why he didn’t get an operation then and he said, ‘I didn’t want my body to be opened. I didn’t want to be violated in that way.’”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

173. “Falling in love is not the most stupid thing that people do,” Einstein scribbled on the letter, “but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.”

— Walter Isaacson

174. “Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. 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

175. “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”

— Walter Isaacson

176. “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

177. “Rather than try to conform, he made a point of being different, dressing and carrying himself as a dandy.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

179. “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

180. “We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or.”

— Walter Isaacson

181. “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

182. “Use for yourself little,” he said, “but give to others much.”26.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

184. “Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

186. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

189. “The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously – carefully.”

— Walter Isaacson

190. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

196. “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

197. “In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, ” Memento Mori”: Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instill some humility.”

— Walter Isaacson

198. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

200. “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