Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Because a lot of people think they’re crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

303. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

305. “Her work also illustrates, as Leonardo da Vinci’s did, that the key to innovation is connecting a curiosity about basic science to the practical work of devising tools that can be applied to our lives – moving discoveries from lab bench to bedside.”

— Walter Isaacson

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

311. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

319. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

339. “The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

342. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have – Porsche, Ferrari, Prius – because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product.” Starting.”

— Walter Isaacson

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

348. “The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson