Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC.”

— Walter Isaacson

402. “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

403. “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

404. “To him, marriage was confining, which was a state he instinctively resisted.”

— Walter Isaacson

405. “The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.”

— Walter Isaacson

406. “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

407. “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

408. “Search the phrase “the man who invented” on Amazon and you get 1,860 book results. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how today’s technology revolution was fashioned.”

— Walter Isaacson

409. “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

410. “Looking back at a century that will be remembered for its willingness to break classical bonds, and looking ahead to an era that seeks to nurture the creativity needed for scientific innovation, one person stands out as a paramount icon of our age: the kindly refugee from oppression whose wild halo of hair, twinkling eyes, engaging humanity, and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

411. “1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15 million.”

— Walter Isaacson

412. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

415. “Baby You’re a Rich Man 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. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them.”

— Walter Isaacson

416. “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

417. “Jobs quoted Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He added, “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

418. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

426. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and.”

— Walter Isaacson

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

434. “His paper, titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” was published in the April 1965 issue of Electronics magazine.”

— Walter Isaacson

435. “What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect.”

— Walter Isaacson

436. “Evite los compartimentos estancos.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

438. “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

439. “His personality was reflected in the products he created.”

— Walter Isaacson

440. “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

441. “Walker Photos For almost thirty years, photographer Diana Walker has had special access to her friend Steve Jobs. Here is a selection from her portfolio.”

— 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. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?”

— Walter Isaacson

444. “At the age of 31, he had five children to raise, a trade to tend, and a shop to keep. He needed a robust new wife, and he needed her quickly.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

446. “I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0,’ a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States,” said Carl June, a noted cancer researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who at the time was still struggling to get regulatory approval for a similar clinical trial.”

— Walter Isaacson

447. “In explaining the amazing mechanisms of life, little things matter. And very little things matter a lot.”

— Walter Isaacson

448. “Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

449. “If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

— Walter Isaacson

450. “Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.”

— Walter Isaacson