Walter Isaacson Quotes

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.

I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

It's about doing something larger than yourself. It's about serving this world, helping others.

...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

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.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

If you act like you can do something, then it will work.

I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

Vision w/o execution is just hallucination. You need the right combination of visionary + team that can execute

Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.

I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters

I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.

I think right now we need to look back at the founding values of our country. Rise above partisanship, be less bitter when it comes to important matters that have to be solved.

If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.

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.

Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

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)

I think when you're looking for people to interview, you want to make it fair and honest. You're not just bringing people on so you can beat them up or, you know, make fools out of them or something

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.

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.

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.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

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

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.

Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.

I've asked Jobs why he didn't get an operation then and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened... I didn't want to be violated in that way.'

I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.

I used to be an angry man myself. I’m a recovering assaholic so I could recognize that in Steve. (quoting Jean-Louis Gassée)

I don't think there was enough skepticism because I think most of us kind of believed that Saddam Hussein was building biological, chemical, and perhaps even, nuclear weapons.

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence.

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

I think that we shouldn't be fixated all the time on the ups and downs of the weekly ratings, of the quarter-hour ratings.

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

Let's crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books

I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight - Steve Jobs

I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.

What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.

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)

I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.

Mainly, the reason people who didn't succeed had trouble because they had trouble forming teams. They didn't know how to collaborate.