Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of “trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”60.”

— Walter Isaacson

203. “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

204. “Man is very capable of imagining infinite happiness, and he should be able to grasp the infinity of space – I.”

— Walter Isaacson

205. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

207. “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

208. “I think it’s really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It’s bringing more and more people in to watching the news.”

— Walter Isaacson

209. “We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.”

— Walter Isaacson

210. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

212. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

214. “I think it’s very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don’t have to be morally neutral about terrorism.”

— Walter Isaacson

215. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

217. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

219. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

221. “It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance.”

— Walter Isaacson

222. “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

223. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

— Walter Isaacson

224. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”

— Walter Isaacson

225. “The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.”

— Walter Isaacson

226. “Eddy Cue, who was in charge of the store, predicted that Apple would sell a million songs in six months. Instead the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six days.”

— Walter Isaacson

227. “In it he argued that unrestrained capitalism produced great disparities of wealth, cycles of boom and depression, and festering levels of unemployment. The system encouraged selfishness instead of cooperation, and acquiring wealth rather than serving others. People were educated for careers rather than for a love of work and creativity. And political parties became corrupted by political contributions from owners of great capital.”

— Walter Isaacson

228. “And if you don’t have your ears open, you’re not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.”

— Walter Isaacson

229. “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

230. “Einstein rejected the emission theory in favor of postulating that the speed of a light beam was constant no matter how fast its source was moving.”

— Walter Isaacson

231. “America’s most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. “America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here,” he told the socialist leader Norman Thomas.”

— Walter Isaacson

232. “Many of the prophecy-riddles reflect Leonardo’s love for animals. “Countless numbers will have their little children taken away and their throats shall be cut,” is one prophecy, as if describing a brutal act of war and genocide. But then Leonardo, who had become a vegetarian, reveals that this prophecy refers to the sheep and cows that humans eat.”

— Walter Isaacson

233. “You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

235. “As a result, the process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple’s Power Macs. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential,” he said. “To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

237. “The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.” The.”

— Walter Isaacson

238. “There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.”

— Walter Isaacson

239. “I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”

— Walter Isaacson

240. “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

241. “He wished to please everybody,” Franklin later said of Keith, “and having little to give, he gave expectations.”

— Walter Isaacson

242. “Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.”

— Walter Isaacson

243. “Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after.”

— Walter Isaacson

244. “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

245. “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

246. “At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t.”

— Walter Isaacson

247. “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom.”

— Walter Isaacson

248. “That was back when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of making it affordable.”

— Walter Isaacson

249. “His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.”

— Walter Isaacson

250. “Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.”27.”

— Walter Isaacson