Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Empiece por los detalles.”

— Walter Isaacson

352. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

— Walter Isaacson

353. “The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the “new Prometheus” for stealing the fire of heaven. He quickly became not only the most celebrated scientist in America and Europe, but also a popular hero. In solving one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, he had conquered one of nature’s most terrifying dangers.”

— Walter Isaacson

354. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

356. “Every reasonable person must strive to promote moderation and a more objective judgment.”3.”

— Walter Isaacson

357. “Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way. I had visited a lot of just-in-time factories in Japan, and I’d built one for the Mac and at NeXT. I knew what I wanted, and I met Tim, and he wanted the same.”

— Walter Isaacson

358. “It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

— Walter Isaacson

359. “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

360. “Ive was a fan of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who worked for the electronics firm Braun. Rams preached the gospel of “Less but better,” Weniger aber besser, and likewise Jobs and Ive wrestled with each new design to see how much they could simplify it.”

— Walter Isaacson

361. “If you wish to make an imaginary animal invented by you appear natural, let us say a dragon, take for the head that of a mastiff or hound, for the eyes a cat, and for the ears a porcupine, and for the nose a greyhound, and the brows of a lion, the temple of an old cock, the neck of a terrapin.”

— Walter Isaacson

362. “Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.”

— Walter Isaacson

363. “Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

365. “At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

— Walter Isaacson

366. “Sea curioso, infatigablemente curioso.”

— Walter Isaacson

367. “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

368. “I keep thinking about all the time away from my family this will cause, and the time away from the other family at Pixar,” Jobs said. “But the only reason I want to do it is that the world will be a better place with Apple in it.”

— Walter Isaacson

369. “It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. “It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”

— Walter Isaacson

370. “I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.”

— Walter Isaacson

371. “Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?”

— Walter Isaacson

372. “We must remember that this is a very small star,” he responded, “and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy.”73.”

— Walter Isaacson

373. “While the men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made their way home alone through a very cold February night.”

— Walter Isaacson

374. “Near the end of his job application to Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo touted himself as someone who could “be the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings.” But for his first few years in Milan, he had trouble getting any such commissions. So for the time being, he pursued his architectural interests the way he did his military interests: mainly on paper as imaginative visions never to be implemented.”

— Walter Isaacson

375. “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

376. “The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard,” according to Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist.”

— Walter Isaacson

377. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” Gates’s.”

— Walter Isaacson

378. “Ginevra de Benci was made by a young artist with astonishing skills of observation. The Mona Lisa is the work of a man who had used those skills to immerse himself in a lifetime of intellectual passions.”

— Walter Isaacson

379. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.”

— Walter Isaacson

380. “So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”

— Walter Isaacson

381. “I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will.”

— Walter Isaacson

382. “By 1940 Grace Hopper was bored. She had no children, her marriage was unexciting, and teaching math was not as fulfilling as she had hoped.”

— Walter Isaacson

383. “Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant.”

— Walter Isaacson

384. “In fact, neither explanation does Jobs and Apple justice. As the case of the forgotten Iowa inventor John Atanasoff shows, conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution. Jobs and his team took Xerox’s ideas, improved them, implemented them, and marketed them.”

— Walter Isaacson

385. “Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

— Walter Isaacson

386. “It is 1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.”

— Walter Isaacson

387. “Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.”

— Walter Isaacson

388. “Put off this sloth,” the master said, “for shame! Sitting on feather-pillows, lying reclined Beneath the blanket is no way to fame – Fame, without which man’s life wastes out of mind, Leaving on earth no more memorial Than foam in water or smoke upon the wind.”

— Walter Isaacson

389. “PDP-1 was the first computer to be designed for direct interaction with the user.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

391. “After you interact with Ginevra de’ Benci long enough, what at first seem like a vacant face and distant stare begin to appear suffused with a haunting tinge of emotion. She seems pensive and ruminating, perhaps about her marriage or the departure of Bembo, or because of some deeper mystery. Her life was sad; she was sickly and remained childless. But she also had an inner intensity. She wrote poetry, one line of which survives: “I ask your forgiveness; I am a mountain tiger.”

— Walter Isaacson

392. “I will a little tink.”

— Walter Isaacson

393. “He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean.”

— Walter Isaacson

394. “I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.”

— Walter Isaacson

395. “Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by Jobs, is that what transpired was less a heist by Apple than a fumble by Xerox. “They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management. “They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could.”

— Walter Isaacson

396. “Franklin’s scientific achievements placed him in the pantheon with Newton. Franklin’s experiments, he wrote in 1941, “afforded a basis for the explanation for all the known phenomena of electricity.”16 Franklin.”

— Walter Isaacson

397. “Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.” Unfortunately.”

— Walter Isaacson

398. “Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength,” Kissinger wrote. That would also become one of Kissinger’s guiding principles.”

— Walter Isaacson

399. “Ingenuity without wisdom is dangerous.”

— Walter Isaacson

400. “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