Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.”

— Walter Isaacson

252. “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

253. “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

254. “People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”

— Walter Isaacson

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

259. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

261. “Public awareness is an important component of innovation.”

— Walter Isaacson

262. “Suddenly Einstein jumped up. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Are you boiling the liver in water?” Mrs. Frank allowed that was indeed what she was doing. “The boiling-point of water is too low,” Einstein declared. “You must use a substance with a higher boiling-point such as butter or fat.” From then on, Mrs. Frank referred to the necessity of frying liver as “Einstein’s theory.”

— Walter Isaacson

263. “Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin.”

— Walter Isaacson

264. “Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm.”

— Walter Isaacson

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six months.” It was a wildly optimistic assessment, but also a motivating one.”

— Walter Isaacson

269. “Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”

— Walter Isaacson

270. “One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller’s voice then dropped to a whisper. “Please don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I am Dr. Einstein, I’m on my way home, and I’ve forgotten where my house is.”40.”

— Walter Isaacson

271. “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

272. “Franklin was worried that his fondness for conversation and eagerness to impress made him prone to “prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company.” Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue.”

— Walter Isaacson

273. “Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house.”

— Walter Isaacson

274. “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

277. “In fact, these terms devised by Franklin are the ones we still use today, along with other neologisms that he coined to describe his findings: battery, charged, neutral, condense, and conductor.”

— Walter Isaacson

278. “In 1958 a Cornell professor, Frank Rosenblatt, attempted to do this by devising a mathematical approach for creating an artificial neural network like that of the brain, which he called a Perceptron.”

— Walter Isaacson

279. “He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.”

— Walter Isaacson

280. “He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur... He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”

— Walter Isaacson

281. “Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn’t quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak’s board. Wanting to create a business.”

— Walter Isaacson

282. “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

283. “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

284. “Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don’t know how it works. They don’t fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination.”8.”

— Walter Isaacson

285. “I’ve always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.”

— Walter Isaacson

286. “Okay, it’s not easy, but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.”

— Walter Isaacson

287. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”

— Walter Isaacson

288. “Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science.”

— Walter Isaacson

289. “You know, one of these things that happened in the ’60s and ’70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.”

— Walter Isaacson

290. “I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.”

— Walter Isaacson

291. “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

292. “There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.”

— Walter Isaacson

293. “Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne painting, he portrays the sky’s luminous and misty gradations of blue as no other painter had done. The recent cleaning of the painting fully reveals the magical realism, veiled in vapors, of his distant mountains and skyline.”

— Walter Isaacson

294. “He never really cared too much about mechanical things.”

— Walter Isaacson

295. “Tolerance of free expression and independence of thought, he repeatedly argued, were the core values that Americans, to his delight, most cherished.”

— Walter Isaacson

296. “Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”

— Walter Isaacson

297. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

— Walter Isaacson

298. “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

299. “Bezos was methodical. His motto was gradatim ferociter, or “Step by step, ferociously.”

— Walter Isaacson

300. “The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting traits: a leader is either very inclusive or a passionate visionary. But the best leaders could be both. Robert.”

— Walter Isaacson