Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

257. “But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.”

— Walter Isaacson

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

270. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much. Mr.”

— Walter Isaacson

277. “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

278. “He also noted that the veins of humans narrow with age, but the springs and rivers of the earth continually enlarge their channels.30.”

— Walter Isaacson

279. “The Apple Marketing Philosophy.”

— Walter Isaacson

280. “I think that we shouldn’t be fixated all the time on the ups and downs of the weekly ratings, of the quarter-hour ratings.”

— Walter Isaacson

281. “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

282. “In the age of the internet when everybody’s a pundit, we’re still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that’s very expensive.”

— Walter Isaacson

283. “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

284. “Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.”

— Walter Isaacson

285. “According to a tale recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, he made his point in a pithier way to an anxious lady named Mrs. Powel, who accosted him outside the hall. What type of government, she asked, have you delegates given us? To which he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”33 The.”

— Walter Isaacson

286. “Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.”

— Walter Isaacson

287. “Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men.”

— Walter Isaacson

288. “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

289. “So he grew up not only with a sense of having once been abandoned, but also with a sense that he was special. In his own mind, that was more important in the formation of his personality.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

291. “His scientific understanding of optics thus enhanced the three-dimensional illusion of the painting.8.”

— Walter Isaacson

292. “I want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.”

— Walter Isaacson

293. “Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.”

— Walter Isaacson

294. “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote in her “Notes.” “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” A century later this assertion would be dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

296. “Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his letter that he and Allen had used more than $40,000 worth of computer time to make BASIC, he omitted the fact that he had never actually paid for that time and that much of it was on Harvard’s military-supplied computer, funded by American taxpayers.”

— Walter Isaacson

297. “Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: “Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer.”

— Walter Isaacson

298. “Einstein was not used to self-righting political systems. Nor did he fully appreciate how resilient America’s democracy and its nurturing of individual liberty could be. So for a while his disdain deepened. But he was saved from serious despair by his wry detachment and his sense of humor. He was not destined to die a bitter man.”

— Walter Isaacson

299. “A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.”

— Walter Isaacson

300. “I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

— Walter Isaacson