Top 100 Walter Isaacson Quotes
#1. I want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.
Walter Isaacson
#2. I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you're more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish.
Walter Isaacson
#4. Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn't quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak's board. Wanting to create a business.
Walter Isaacson
#5. The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.
Walter Isaacson
#6. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
Walter Isaacson
#7. Steve Jobs had a tendency to see things in a binary way: A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit
Walter Isaacson
#8. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,
Walter Isaacson
#9. In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers. In
Walter Isaacson
#11. Authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.
Walter Isaacson
#12. If you didn't voice your opinion, [Steve Jobs] would mow you down," said Cook. "He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing, then you'll never survive.
Walter Isaacson
#13. A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
Walter Isaacson
#14. Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)
Walter Isaacson
#15. Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a company into the future. If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example
Walter Isaacson
#17. In September 1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up a whiteboard emblazoned "Google Worldwide Headquarters.
Walter Isaacson
#20. People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.
Walter Isaacson
#21. The ability of Isaacson to write books that capture an age as well as a man makes him one of our best and most important biographers. Steve Jobs shows Isaacson at his best." - Foreign
Walter Isaacson
#22. A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.46
Walter Isaacson
#23. The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.
Walter Isaacson
#24. When Jobs saw the corporate fitness center, he was astonished that executives had an area, with its own whirlpool, separate from that of the regular employees.
Walter Isaacson
#25. Tangerine clam, and a professional desktop computer that suggested a Zen ice cube. Like bell-bottoms that turn up in the
Walter Isaacson
#26. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially," he told Dukas. "I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.
Walter Isaacson
#27. What is it you don't understand about the universe?" Jobs replied, "I don't understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.
Walter Isaacson
#28. It's also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.
Walter Isaacson
#29. Progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps.
Walter Isaacson
#30. Wozniak began to rankle at Jobs's style. Steve was too tough on people. I wanted our company to feel like a family where we all had fun and shared whatever we made.
Walter Isaacson
#31. was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity,
Walter Isaacson
#32. He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone." Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
Walter Isaacson
#33. I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world," Steve Wozniak later recalled. "It takes society to a new level.
Walter Isaacson
#34. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that. Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts.
Walter Isaacson
#36. For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence.
Walter Isaacson
#38. Photographs About Walter Isaacson Sources Notes Illustration Credits Index The
Walter Isaacson
#39. A few days after he unveiled the iPad in January 2010, Jobs held a "town hall" meeting with employees at Apple's campus.
Walter Isaacson
#40. You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.
Walter Isaacson
#41. 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
#42. Vision w/o execution is just hallucination. You need the right combination of visionary + team that can execute
Walter Isaacson
#43. Therein lies the key, I think, to Einstein's brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.
Walter Isaacson
#44. When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded.
Walter Isaacson
#45. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#46. At the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement,
Walter Isaacson
#47. Steve Jobs was never going to let Flash on any Apple product again like that after in 1997 - he's got a long memory - they said no and Bill Gates said yes.
Walter Isaacson
#48. I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight - Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
#49. Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.
Walter Isaacson
#50. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
Walter Isaacson
#52. Customers don't know what they want until we've shown them.
Walter Isaacson
#53. Veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his "reality distortion field." Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory
Walter Isaacson
#54. Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book. (Steven Levy)
Walter Isaacson
#56. rethink things. There was something about the design that lacked purity, he felt. "Why
Walter Isaacson
#57. Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy.
Walter Isaacson
#58. Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled "On the Laboring Poor," which he signed "Medius,
Walter Isaacson
#59. Playing juvenile pranks. In twelfth grade he built an electronic metronome - one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class - and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged
Walter Isaacson
#60. I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.
Walter Isaacson
#61. People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it.
Walter Isaacson
#62. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.
Walter Isaacson
#63. We kind of missed the boat on that," he recalled. " So we needed to catch up real fast." The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it find itself behind.
Walter Isaacson
#64. He lies not because it's in his interest, he lies because it's in his nature." It was in Jobs's nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was warranted.
Walter Isaacson
#65. What drives people to kill and maim each other so savagely?" Einstein asked. "I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions.
Walter Isaacson
#66. and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child.
Walter Isaacson
#68. Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.
Walter Isaacson
#69. Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.
Walter Isaacson
#70. Never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.
Walter Isaacson
#71. Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth - rocks.
Walter Isaacson
#73. Designed by Joy O'Meara Manufactured in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10
Walter Isaacson
#75. Von Neumann, by contrast, wore a three-piece suit at almost all times, including on a donkey ride down the Grand Canyon; even as a student he was so well dressed that, upon first meeting him, the mathematician David Hilbert reportedly had but one question: Who is his tailor?45
Walter Isaacson
#76. CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna's firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving
Walter Isaacson
#77. I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
Walter Isaacson
#78. To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone. His
Walter Isaacson
#79. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.
Walter Isaacson
#80. He said, 'From then on, I realized that I was not just abandoned. I was chosen. I was special.' And I think that's the key to understanding Steve Jobs.
Walter Isaacson
#81. You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education.
Walter Isaacson
#82. His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, "Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity."9 On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself. Einstein
Walter Isaacson
#83. Write a biography of him. I had recently published one
Walter Isaacson
#84. Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it's better."12
Walter Isaacson
#85. Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.
Walter Isaacson
#86. It was not merely intelligence that she saw. Years later she liked to show off a
Walter Isaacson
#87. They'd ever enjoyed. Almost everyone mentioned some nice experience at a Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel.
Walter Isaacson
#88. Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.
Walter Isaacson
#89. Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.
Walter Isaacson
#90. Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there.
Walter Isaacson
#91. But when he and Zuse proposed it to the German Army in 1942, the commanders said they were confident that they would win the war before the two years it would take to build such a machine.
Walter Isaacson
#92. It takes a lot of hard work," he said, "to make something simple,
Walter Isaacson
#93. 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
#95. If he was displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and use expletives, but he wouldn't do it in a way that would totally destroy the person he was talking to. It was just his way to get the person to do a better job.
Walter Isaacson
#96. It's about doing something larger than yourself. It's about serving this world, helping others.
Walter Isaacson
#97. When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.
Walter Isaacson
#99. Taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned
Walter Isaacson
#100. During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.
Walter Isaacson
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