Walter Isaacson Quotes

In two days he saw Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the top executives at the New York Times; and executives at Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc. magazines. “I would love to help quality journalism,” he later said. “We can’t depend on bloggers for our news.

Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead

If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.

Walter Issacson biographer of Steve Jobs:

I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, “ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50/50, maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.”

Then he paused for a second and said, “Yea, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “ And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”

Joy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!

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.

"The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme." Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. " One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes."

Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.

The best and most innovative products don't always win...(it's an) aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked

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.

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.”40

It certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood

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.

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.

Algunas personas proponen: «Dales a los clientes lo que quieren». Pero esa no es mi postura. Nuestro trabajo consiste en averiguar qué van a querer antes de que lo sepan. Creo que fue Henry Ford quien dijo una vez: «Si les hubiera preguntado a mis clientes qué querían, me habrían contestado: “¡Un caballo más rápido!”». La gente no sabe lo que quiere hasta que se lo enseñas. Por eso nunca me he basado en las investigaciones de mercado. Nuestra tarea estriba en leer las páginas que todavía no se han escrito.

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 lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.