Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one.”

— Walter Isaacson

404. “Even at a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know: Things led to their opposites.”

— Walter Isaacson

405. “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

406. “Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,” Einstein noted. A version of this philosophy, sometimes called positivism, denied the validity of any concepts that went beyond descriptions of phenomena that we directly experience.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

408. “Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

410. “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

411. “Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.”

— Walter Isaacson

412. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

— Walter Isaacson

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato “Leonardo’s famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

422. “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

423. “I will a little tink.”

— Walter Isaacson

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC.”

— Walter Isaacson

428. “Sealing the Microsoft deal by phone with Gates: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.”

— Walter Isaacson

429. “Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.”

— Walter Isaacson

430. “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

431. “New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce.”

— Walter Isaacson

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

435. “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

436. “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

437. “1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15 million.”

— Walter Isaacson

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson