Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

207. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.”

— Walter Isaacson

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?”

— Walter Isaacson

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

249. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson