Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one.”

— Walter Isaacson

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “Empiece por los detalles.”

— Walter Isaacson

409. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

411. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “The metaphor, though obvious, is too good to resist: Franklin, by nature, liked to find ingenious ways to calm turbulent waters. But during his time as a diplomat in England, this instinct would fail him.”

— Walter Isaacson

439. “Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex.”

— Walter Isaacson

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

449. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson