Walter Seff Isaacson
Walter Isaacson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time. (Walter Isaacson Quotes)
“A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“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
The Innovators
“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
The Innovators
“A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“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
Einstein
“Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to “the difference personalities make.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“As the crisis waned during the fall of 1961, so did the last vestiges of Kissinger’s influence at the White House. In October he cleaned out his desk. Bundy sent him a letter of perfunctory thanks, which added that the White House had decided not to make a public announcement of his departure.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“At a reception at the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue, which now boasts the world’s most interesting statue of Einstein, a twelve foot high, full-length bronze figure of him reclining, he listened to long speeches from honorees, including Prince Albert I of Monaco, who was an avid oceanographer, a North Carolina scholar of hookworms, and a man who had invented a solar stove. As the evening droned on Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next him and said, “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein The Life of a Genius
“At the behest of Princeton’s President, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than one hundred and twenty-five complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony but he talked right over my head anyway.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein The Life of a Genius
“At the front in Germany near the end of the war, McCloy discovered that the ninth-century city of Rothenburg was about to be shelled. McCloy’s mother had once visited the town and brought back etchings; he knew it was an ancient center of German culture. “This is one of Europe’s last great walled cities,” he told the American commander. Perhaps, McCloy suggested, it could be induced to surrender peacefully. It was, and after the war the city voted him an honorary burgher.”
Walter Isaacson
The Wise Men
“Authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Besides, I believe that older people who have scarcely anything to lose ought to be willing to speak out in behalf of those who are young and are subject to much greater restraint.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“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
Kissinger
“Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is no more.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a light bulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.” (Walter Isaacson Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Causality expresses the pattern which the mind imposes on a sequence of events in order to make their appearance comprehensible.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“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
Einstein
“Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Einstein rejected the emission theory in favor of postulating that the speed of a light beam was constant no matter how fast its source was moving.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Einstein was not used to self-righting political systems. Nor did he fully appreciate how resilient America’s democracy and its nurturing of individual liberty could be. So for a while his disdain deepened. But he was saved from serious despair by his wry detachment and his sense of humor. He was not destined to die a bitter man.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Einstein’s was a beautiful mix of confidence and awe.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. He ordered them to bring five different options and he would pick the one he liked.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Falling in love is not the most stupid thing that people do,” Einstein scribbled on the letter, “but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“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
The Innovators
“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
The Innovators
“For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled “On the Laboring Poor,” which he signed “Medius.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Franklin’s most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Given a choice of order or justice, he often said, paraphrasing Goethe, he would choose order. He had seen too clearly the consequences of disorder.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“He also noted that the veins of humans narrow with age, but the springs and rivers of the earth continually enlarge their channels.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn’t think I could do… If you trust him, you can do things. If he’s decided that something should happen, then he’s just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” Joanna Hoffman said. “It’s a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.” (Walter Isaacson Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people,” Kissinger once said of Rockefeller. “I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“He never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“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
Einstein
“He was more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations than metaphysical abstractions or deductive proofs.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: “Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“His scientific understanding of optics thus enhanced the three-dimensional illusion of the painting.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“How did he get his ideas? “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight – Steve Jobs ”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said, “at least for me.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.” Steve Jobs”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“I had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“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
Steve Jobs
“I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake,” he said. “Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister.” Freedom was a foundation for creativity.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“If you act like you can do something, then it will work.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently. (Steve Jobs)”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“In classic Steve fashion, he would agree to something, but it would never happen,” said Lack. “He would set you up and then pull it off the table. He’s pathological, which can be useful in negotiations. And he’s a genius.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“In doing so, he learned one of his pragmatic lessons about jealousy and modesty: he found that people were reluctant to support a “proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one’s reputation.” (Walter Isaacson Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“In fact, these terms devised by Franklin are the ones we still use today, along with other neologisms that he coined to describe his findings: battery, charged, neutral, condense, and conductor.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“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
Steve Jobs
“Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Innovation requires articulation.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“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
The Innovators
“Innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“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
Einstein
“It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“It was a grand triumph but not one easily understood. The skeptical Silverstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. “Don’t be modest, Eddington,” said Silverstein. Replied Eddington, “On the contrary, I’m just wondering who the third might be.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein The Life of a Genius
“It was a sunny day, and Einstein merrily played with the telescope’s dials and instruments. Elsa came along as well, and it was explained to her that the equipment was used to determine the scope and shape of the universe. She reportedly replied, “Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“It was by all accounts a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weissmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weissmann gave a delightful reply. “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
Einstein The Life of a Genius
“It’s harder and less glorious, to realize that legitimate values sometimes conflict with one another, and they have to be balanced. This is not a talent that is exalted on talk radio or cable news shows. But the need to calibrate a proper balance among opposing principles is evident in every issue we face today, from abortion to health-care reform to affirmative action.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“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
Steve Jobs
“Kissinger once said of Israel’s Moshe Dayan that he was “a brilliant manipulator of people and yet emotionally dependent on them.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“Kissinger’s main course was “Principles of International Relations,” which usually drew more than two hundred undergraduates enticed by his newfound humor and charisma. He started with Napoleon, dwelled on Metternich and Bismarck, and concluded with an analysis of the current trends in arms control.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Knowing when to stand firm on principle or when to find common ground with your fellow citizens is the most important, and also the most difficult, activity in a democracy. There’s no simple formula for it. That is why it is so useful to have narratives.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne painting, he portrays the sky’s luminous and misty gradations of blue as no other painter had done. The recent cleaning of the painting fully reveals the magical realism, veiled in vapors, of his distant mountains and skyline.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Loyalty to a party, Einstein felt, meant surrendering some independence of thought. Such conformity confounded him. “How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Man’s knowledge of freedom, Kissinger argued, must come from an inner intuition.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought,” Wiener wrote. “This is not the case.” The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Medical indicators, monitor our health conditions on our phones, and share the data with doctors and researchers. Doudna added that the pandemic had accelerated the convergence of science with other fields. “The engagement of non-scientists in our work will help achieve an incredibly interesting biotechnology revolution,” she predicted. This was molecular biology’s moment.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. ” My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it, : he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also,, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his pocket in which he minute all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“On Startups: “I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.” (Walter Isaacson Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“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
Steve Jobs
“Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other ‘My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.” Leonardo mastered all three.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“One of Job’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
Steve Jobs
“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
Steve Jobs
“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. “As you go about town,” he wrote in one of them, “constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows. “ For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Only through the personal awareness and “inward conviction” that we each have of our own freedom, Kissinger concluded.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“People know how to deal with a desktop intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk. The one on the top is the most important. People know how to switch priority. Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“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
The Innovators
“Physicists are not used to trimming or compromising their equations in order to get them accepted. Which is why they do not make good politicians.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Public awareness is an important component of innovation.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“Reliable rule of diplomacy that you cannot win at the bargaining table something that you would be unable to win on the ground.”
Walter Isaacson
Kissinger
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“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
Steve Jobs
“Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“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
Steve Jobs
“Steve Jobs: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“That was back when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of making it affordable.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“The beauty of nature and the joy that comes from unstructured human engagement is a powerful combination.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“The culture at Atari was a natural outgrowth of Nolan Bushnell’s personality. But it was not simply self-indulgent. It was based on a philosophy that drew from the hippie movement and would help define Silicon Valley. At it’s core were certain principles: authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired and creativity should be nurtured.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“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
Steve Jobs
“The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“The maker culture in America, ever since the days of community barn raisers and quilting bees, often involved do-it-ourselves rather than do-it-yourself.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting traits: a leader is either very inclusive or a passionate visionary. But the best leaders could be both. Robert”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.” (Walter Isaacson Quotes)
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“The thing that Von Neumann had, which I’ve noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem, the one crucial thing that’s important.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“The thrust of his parent’s views, at least when applied to the situation of Mileva Maric rather than Marie Winteler, was that a wife was a luxury, affordable only when a man was making a comfortable living. “I have a low opinion of that view of a relationship between a man and wife,” Einstein told Maric, “Because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a life-long contract.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein The Life of a Genius
“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, Einstein said.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“There was the mother who offered up three of her flock of sons, the Dutch surgeon who wanted to study bodies that had been blown apart, and the Benedictine monk who promised to pray for America if it would pay off his gambling debts.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going,” he wrote in 1510. “Practice must always be founded on sound theory.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“Vision without execution is hallucination… Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo da Vinci knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“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
The Code Breaker
“We had to determine structures, because structures, the folds and shapes, are conserved over a longer evolutionary period than the nucleic acid sequences.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“We have 100,000 people in the U.S. affected by sickle cell,” one senator pointed out. “How are we going to afford that if it’s $1 million per patient? That just breaks the bank.”
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
“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
Steve Jobs
“We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“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
Steve Jobs
“What do you think of Adolf Hitler?” Einstein replied, “He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.”
Walter Isaacson
Einstein
“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
Einstein
“When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“When highbrow critics accused Time of practicing personality journalism, Luce replied that Time did not invent the genre, the Bible did.”
Walter Isaacson
American Sketches
“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
Steve Jobs
“When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
“While she slept, her subconscious untangled the knot that her conscious mind had been unable to.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Walter Isaacson
Leonardo da Vinci
“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.”
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin
“You read everything that’s part of the job,” he said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.”
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
“You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
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