Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

303. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

305. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

307. “Einstein’s theory produced a law of the photoelectric effect that was experimentally testable: the energy of emitted electrons would depend on the frequency of the light according to a simple mathematical formula involving Planck’s constant.”

— Walter Isaacson

308. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

311. “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

312. “Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.”

— Walter Isaacson

313. “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

314. “The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously – carefully.”

— Walter Isaacson

315. “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

— Walter Isaacson

316. “A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up.”

— Walter Isaacson

317. “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

318. “Grove’s mantra was “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent.”

— Walter Isaacson

319. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.”

— Walter Isaacson

320. “The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”73.”

— Walter Isaacson

321. “Evite los compartimentos estancos.”

— Walter Isaacson

322. “By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see Xerox PARC’s technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn’t been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox scientists called.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

324. “The Apple Marketing Philosophy.”

— Walter Isaacson

325. “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

326. “Gates was the prime example of the innovator’s personality. “An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed as a bit imbalanced,” he said. “Certainly in my teens and 20s, I fit that model.”

— Walter Isaacson

327. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.”

— Walter Isaacson

328. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. The artful minimalism of the speech gave it simplicity, purity, and charm.”

— Walter Isaacson

329. “There was harmony in proportions, Leonardo learned, and math was nature’s brushstroke.”

— Walter Isaacson

330. “Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

— Walter Isaacson

331. “The Jew who abandons his faith,” he once said, “is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail.”68.”

— Walter Isaacson

332. “Closely related are the entries in his bestiary, a compendium of short tales of animals and moral lessons based on their traits. Bestiaries were popular among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, and the spread of printing presses meant that many were reprinted in Italy beginning in the 1470s. Leonardo had a copy of the bestiary written by Pliny the Elder and three others by medieval compilers.”

— Walter Isaacson

333. “Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.”

— Walter Isaacson

334. “Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.”12.”

— Walter Isaacson

335. “Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”

— Walter Isaacson

336. “Embora eu achasse que estivesse aprendendo a viver, eu estava aprendendo a morrer.”48.”

— Walter Isaacson

337. “A person “at rest” on the equator is actually spinning with the earth’s rotation at 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting with the earth around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour.”

— Walter Isaacson

338. “He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair.”

— Walter Isaacson

339. “His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest.”

— Walter Isaacson

340. “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions,” he wrote, “it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”

— Walter Isaacson

341. “Plato inscribed over the door of his Academy: “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work.”

— Walter Isaacson

342. “Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.”

— Walter Isaacson

343. “Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.”

— Walter Isaacson

344. “To him, marriage was confining, which was a state he instinctively resisted.”

— Walter Isaacson

345. “Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story.”

— Walter Isaacson

346. “It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done.”

— Walter Isaacson

347. “The following year, students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet connected to the Internet, developed another system, hosted on personal computers, which featured threaded message-and-reply discussion forums. It became known as “Usenet,” and the categories of postings on it were called “newsgroups.”

— Walter Isaacson

348. “Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising. His son was fascinated by the.”

— Walter Isaacson

349. “Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought,” Wiener wrote. “This is not the case.”14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.”

— Walter Isaacson

350. “The branches of the leafless tree merge into the man’s body, then into the conical geometrical pattern, and finally into the mountainous landscape. What Leonardo probably began as four distinct elements ended up woven together in a way that illustrates a fundamental theme in his art and science: the interconnectedness of nature, the unity of its patterns, and the analogy between the workings of the human body and those of the earth.”

— Walter Isaacson