Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

158. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

161. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

163. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

166. “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

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

— 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. “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

170. “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

171. “Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

173. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

175. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

177. “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

178. “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

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. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

199. “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

200. “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