Walter Isaacson Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

The Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster,"which did not enhance its popularity.

Walter Isaacson
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
For Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it's better, it's simpler, and it's at the forefront of technology. That's where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.

Walter Isaacson
Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

Walter Isaacson
People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.

Walter Isaacson
Digital technology is doing more to shape our politics than anything since Gutenberg's introduction of the printing press helped Europe usher in the Protestant Reformation.

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

Walter Isaacson
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
When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded.

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

Walter Isaacson
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
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us.

Walter Isaacson
Another time, he was playing [chess] with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. "Ah," said the duchess, "we do not take Kings so." Replied Franklin in a famous quip: "We do in America."

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

Walter Isaacson
I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant.

Walter Isaacson
The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.

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

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

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

Walter Isaacson
Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. I make 50 cents for showing up, he liked to joke, and the other 50 cents is based on performance.

Walter Isaacson
Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

Walter Isaacson
In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse.

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

Walter Isaacson
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.

Walter Isaacson
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
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