Walter Isaacson Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

What has made New Orleans magical for most of it's history is that it's an integrated city with a wealth of different types of people. You see everyone coming back now, and you see that flourishing again. This is where you get jazz, this is where you get good cooking. This is where you get a city that has a special magical flavor.

Walter Isaacson
Steve has a reality distortion field. When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.

Walter Isaacson
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
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."

Walter Isaacson
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
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them.

Walter Isaacson
He would withhold information and even allow a listener to be misled—which comes close to the definition of deceit.

Walter Isaacson
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.

Walter Isaacson
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
Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.

Walter Isaacson
It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.

Walter Isaacson
Never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

Walter Isaacson
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
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)

Walter Isaacson
When Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.

Walter Isaacson
The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.

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

Walter Isaacson
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