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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

226. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

232. “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

233. “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

234. “Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place,” Jobs said.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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