Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Einstein later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”57.”

— Walter Isaacson

403. “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

404. “Empiece por los detalles.”

— Walter Isaacson

405. “One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them.”

— Walter Isaacson

406. “The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

408. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

410. “Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick’s paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

412. “I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer,” he said. “The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they’re out to change the world. We make tools for those kinds of people.”

— Walter Isaacson

413. “If Apple is going to succeed, he told me, we’re going to win on innovation. And you can’t win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate to customers.” When.”

— Walter Isaacson

414. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

417. “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

418. “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

419. “Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and.”

— Walter Isaacson

420. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

422. “Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself.”

— Walter Isaacson

423. “Einstein had a similar conversation with his friend in Prague, Philipp Frank. “A new fashion has arisen in physics,” Einstein complained, which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality. “But the fashion you speak of,” Frank protested, “was invented by you in 1905!” Replied Einstein: “A good joke should not be repeated too often.”61 The.”

— Walter Isaacson

424. “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea,” he once told a student. “If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

— Walter Isaacson

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics.”

— Walter Isaacson

429. “Brief is this existence, as a fleeting visit in a strange house,” he said. “The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.”2 He.”

— Walter Isaacson

430. “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

431. “In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.”

— Walter Isaacson

432. “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

433. “Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak.”

— Walter Isaacson

434. “Gracias started buying more troubled companies. He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” It was a guiding principle that Musk would make his own.”

— Walter Isaacson

435. “Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a part of him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s president. So they launched a search for someone from the outside.”

— Walter Isaacson

436. “His comparisons between man-made machinery and the handiwork of nature produced in him a deep reverence for the latter. “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.”15.”

— Walter Isaacson

437. “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

438. “The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called “Toy Story.”

— Walter Isaacson

439. “We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone,” Jobs declared in an email to a customer. “Folks who want porn can buy an Android.”

— Walter Isaacson

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation.”

— Walter Isaacson

443. “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

446. “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 team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?”

— Walter Isaacson

447. “Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.”

— Walter Isaacson

448. “Apple was destined to be: poetry connected to engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design that’s bold and simple.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

450. “The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.”

— Walter Isaacson