Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe.”

— Walter Isaacson

403. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

— Walter Isaacson

404. “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

405. “His argument was that a great engineer would be remembered only if he teamed with a great marketer, and this required him to commit his designs to the partnership.”

— Walter Isaacson

406. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

411. “I will a little tink.”

— Walter Isaacson

412. “The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.”

— Walter Isaacson

413. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

415. “La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci.31.”

— Walter Isaacson

416. “The Internet and the personal computer were both born in the 1970s, but they grew up apart from one another.”

— Walter Isaacson

417. “When we ascribe credit for an invention, determining who should be most noted by history, one criterion is looking at whose contributions turned out to have the most influence.”

— Walter Isaacson

418. “Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life.”

— Walter Isaacson

419. “Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions of their own and become a threat to humans?”

— Walter Isaacson

420. “Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the people who did in fact invent the Internet’s protocols, spoke up on Gore’s behalf.”

— Walter Isaacson

421. “I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time,” he deadpanned.”

— Walter Isaacson

422. “When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers... When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.”

— Walter Isaacson

423. “Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.” Brand’s.”

— Walter Isaacson

424. “1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15 million.”

— Walter Isaacson

425. “As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines “cooperate in making decisions.” In other words, they would augment each other. “Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.”

— Walter Isaacson

426. “When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that.”

— Walter Isaacson

427. “Let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When Leonardo could not make the perspective in the Battle of Anghiari or the interaction in the Adoration of the Magi work perfectly, he abandoned them rather than produce a work that was merely good enough. He carried around masterpieces such as his Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa to the end, knowing there would always be a new stroke he could add.”

— Walter Isaacson

428. “We all see nature’s wonders every day, whether it be a plant that moves or a sunset that reaches with pink fingers into a sky of deep blue. The key to true curiosity is pausing to ponder the causes. What makes a sky blue or a sunset pink or a leaf of sleeping grass curl?”

— Walter Isaacson

429. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.”

— Walter Isaacson

430. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.”

— Walter Isaacson

431. “The creativity of the Xerox PARC team combined with the design and marketing genius of Jobs would make the GUI the next great leap in facilitating the human-machine interaction that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had envisioned.”

— Walter Isaacson

432. “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9.”

— Walter Isaacson

433. “Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!”

— Walter Isaacson

434. “Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to. 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

435. “Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

437. “Causality expresses the pattern which the mind imposes on a sequence of events in order to make their appearance comprehensible.”

— Walter Isaacson

438. “Then I would explain, it was no use trying to learn math unless they could communicate it with other people.”4.”

— Walter Isaacson

439. “Following the lead of other phone phreaks such as Captain Crunch, they gave themselves handles. Wozniak became “Berkeley Blue,” Jobs was “Oaf Tobark.” They took the.”

— Walter Isaacson

440. “He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls “phoning in rich,” meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor.”

— Walter Isaacson

441. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.”

— Walter Isaacson

442. “The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”

— Walter Isaacson

443. “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

444. “He was still Leonardo, always pursuing a curiosity, less passionate about tying up loose ends.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

446. “I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that. It’s guaranteed to work.”

— Walter Isaacson

447. “You Say You Want a Revolution: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, Paul Otellini. All Things.”

— Walter Isaacson

448. “The central area of the retina, known as the fovea, is best at seeing color and small details; the area surrounding the fovea is best at picking up shadows and shadings of black and white. When we look at an object straight on, it appears sharper. When we look at it peripherally, glimpsing it out of the corner of our eye, it is a bit blurred, as if it were farther away.”

— Walter Isaacson

449. “As an object approaches the speed of light, its apparent mass also increases. Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration still holds, but as the apparent mass increases, more and more force will produce less and less acceleration. There is no way to apply enough force to push even a pebble faster than the speed of light. That’s the ultimate speed limit of the universe, and no particle or piece of information can go faster than that, according to Einstein’s theory.”

— Walter Isaacson

450. “As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to “the difference personalities make”.”

— Walter Isaacson