Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

269. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

279. “Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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