Walter Isaacson Quotes

"Steve's sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling," according to Amelio. " He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Oliver as Macbeth."

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.

History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

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.

While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the “Deluge drawings” that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. “I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction,” he replied.

"Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called " The Top 100." They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you would bring if you could take only a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to your next company. At the end of each retreat, Jobs would stand in front of the whiteboard( he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, " What are ten things we should be doing next?" People would fight to their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down, and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of ten.Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, " We can only do three.

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.

Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.

authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.

In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone.

Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men.

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

He went to the Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.

Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.

Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s “inhumanly sharp eye.” It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. In his notebook, he described his method — almost like a trick — for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.