Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “I think right now we need to look back at the founding values of our country. Rise above partisanship, be less bitter when it comes to important matters that have to be solved.”

— Walter Isaacson

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

212. “If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.”

— Walter Isaacson

213. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

— Walter Isaacson

227. “Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.”

— Walter Isaacson

228. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

230. “People who were not crushed ended up being stronger.”

— Walter Isaacson

231. “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

232. “Therein lies the key, I think, to Einstein’s brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.”

— Walter Isaacson

233. “In doing so, he learned one of his pragmatic lessons about jealousy and modesty: he found that people were reluctant to support a “proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one’s reputation.”

— Walter Isaacson

234. “In other words, there is no single underlying reality that is independent of our observations. “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is,” Bohr declared. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”62 This.”

— Walter Isaacson

235. “See how the wings, striking against the air, sustain the heavy eagle in the thin air on high,” he noted, then added, “As much force is exerted by the object against the air as by the air against the object.”16 Two hundred years later, Newton would state a refined version of this as his third law of motion: “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”

— Walter Isaacson

236. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.”

— Walter Isaacson

237. “People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.”

— Walter Isaacson

238. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he told Dukas. “I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

— Walter Isaacson

239. “Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present.”

— Walter Isaacson

240. “What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”

— Walter Isaacson

241. “As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his personality.”

— Walter Isaacson

242. “Instead, Franklin found “a good and faithful helpmate” who was frugal and practical and devoid of pretensions, traits that he later noted were far more valuable to a rising tradesman.”

— Walter Isaacson

243. “It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.”

— Walter Isaacson

244. “To dwell on the things taht depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.”

— Walter Isaacson

245. “You read everything – that’s part of the job,” he said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.”

— Walter Isaacson

246. “When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.”

— Walter Isaacson

247. “The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. “Don’t be so modest, Eddington!” said Silberstein. Replied Eddington, “On the contrary. I’m just wondering who the third might be.”30.”

— Walter Isaacson

248. “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled.”

— Walter Isaacson

249. “Never do something that a thousand other people are doing.”

— Walter Isaacson

250. “His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever.”

— Walter Isaacson