Top 100 Walter Isaacson Quotes
#1. Photographs About Walter Isaacson Sources Notes Illustration Credits Index The
Walter Isaacson
#2. I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker.
Hillary Clinton
#3. TV was on Mr. Jobs's to-do list. "I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. "I finally cracked it." But then he died,
Anonymous
#4. launched his "Think Different" campaign, featuring iconic
Walter Isaacson
#5. In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.
Walter Isaacson
#6. Finally, on the day that he was scheduled to make the big announcement, Amelio called Jobs in. He needed an answer. Steve, do you just want
Walter Isaacson
#7. You shouldn't whitewash it. He's good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I'd like to see that it's all told truthfully.
Walter Isaacson
#8. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
Walter Isaacson
#9. I want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.
Walter Isaacson
#10. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.
Walter Isaacson
#11. Man is very capable of imagining infinite happiness, and he should be able to grasp the infinity of space - I
Walter Isaacson
#12. I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant.
Walter Isaacson
#13. Laurene, Eve, Erin, and Lisa at the Corinth Canal in Greece, 2006: For young people, this
Walter Isaacson
#15. I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much," he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. "It was the original vision for Apple. That's what we tried to do with the first Mac. That's what we did with the iPod.
Walter Isaacson
#16. freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.
Walter Isaacson
#17. 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
#18. Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different ... to think out of the box.
Walter Isaacson
#19. Let's crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books
Walter Isaacson
#20. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company,
Walter Isaacson
#21. Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.
Walter Isaacson
#22. New idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said. "But," he hastened to add, "intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience."8
Walter Isaacson
#24. 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
#25. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Walter Isaacson
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother
Walter Isaacson
#30. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,
Walter Isaacson
#32. In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers. In
Walter Isaacson
#33. First and foremost is that creativty is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.
Walter Isaacson
#36. Authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.
Walter Isaacson
#37. Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself."14
Walter Isaacson
#38. There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth
Walter Isaacson
#39. Knowledge, he realized, was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.
Walter Isaacson
#40. 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
#41. Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.
Walter Isaacson
#42. If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.
Walter Isaacson
#43. Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
Walter Isaacson
#44. 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
#45. The Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster," which did not enhance its popularity.
Walter Isaacson
#47. Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them. The
Walter Isaacson
#48. The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.
Walter Isaacson
#49. Himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because
Walter Isaacson
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities of Dylan bootlegs," Kottke recalled. "He was both really cool and high-tech.
Walter Isaacson
#53. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I
Walter Isaacson
#54. First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This
Walter Isaacson
#55. And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.
Walter Isaacson
#57. 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
#58. On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
Walter Isaacson
#59. 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
#60. Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. "There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him," Cook said. "That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.
Walter Isaacson
#62. A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
Walter Isaacson
#63. The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academia was, in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological revolution of the late twentieth century.
Walter Isaacson
#65. and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated
Walter Isaacson
#66. Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.
Walter Isaacson
#67. One of Job's great strengths was knowing how to focus. " Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, " he said. " That's true for companies, and it's true for products.
Walter Isaacson
#68. 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
#69. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.
Walter Isaacson
#70. Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?
Walter Isaacson
#71. People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.
Walter Isaacson
#72. Sculley began to believe that Jobs's mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity.
Walter Isaacson
#73. If you act like you can do something, then it will work.
Walter Isaacson
#74. I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.
Walter Isaacson
#75. Engelbart showed, back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today.
Walter Isaacson
#76. 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
#77. A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.46
Walter Isaacson
#78. Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.
Walter Isaacson
#79. Steve and I spent a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. " I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Walter Isaacson
#80. Kathryn Smith: 16 DPA/Landov: 21 Courtesy of Daniel Kottke: 56 Mark Richards: 71, 348 Ted Thai/Polaris: 102
Walter Isaacson
#81. up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve.
Walter Isaacson
#82. The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.
Walter Isaacson
#83. By 1940 Grace Hopper was bored. She had no children, her marriage was unexciting, and teaching math was not as fulfilling as she had hoped.
Walter Isaacson
#85. 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
#86. The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.
Walter Isaacson
#87. More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.
Walter Isaacson
#88. 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
#89. Tangerine clam, and a professional desktop computer that suggested a Zen ice cube. Like bell-bottoms that turn up in the
Walter Isaacson
#90. 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
#91. 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
#94. It's also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.
Walter Isaacson
#95. Progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps.
Walter Isaacson
#96. When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.
Walter Isaacson
#99. He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.
Walter Isaacson
#100. Old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?
Walter Isaacson
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