109+ Walter Isaacson Quotes On Education, Order And Einstein

Walter Isaacson is an American writer and journalist. He is best known for his biographies of prominent figures such as Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger. He is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Walter Isaacson on leadership, education, love.

Top 10 Walter Isaacson Quotes

1. 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.
2. I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. ...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.
6. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
7. Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.
8. I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.
9. 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.
10. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

Walter Isaacson Short Quotes

• Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
• Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.
• What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.
• If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.
• I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.
• Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.
• A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.
• Most of the collaborations of technology were done by teams...Collaboration is key to creativity
• I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
• Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

Walter Isaacson Quotes About Love

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

Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today. — Walter Isaacson

You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology. — Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson Quotes About Books

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

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other. — Walter Isaacson

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

Walter Isaacson Quotes About People

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

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. — Walter Isaacson

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

Most innovation comes from people working together, collaborating in teams. — Walter Isaacson

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. — Walter Isaacson

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. — 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

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. — Walter Isaacson

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

Walter Isaacson Quotes About Jobs

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. — Walter Isaacson

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

He said, 'From then on, I realized that I was not just abandoned. I was chosen. I was special.' And I think that's the key to understanding Steve Jobs. — 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

Steve Jobs was never going to let Flash on any Apple product again like that after in 1997 - he's got a long memory - they said no and Bill Gates said yes. — Walter Isaacson

Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car. — 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

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

Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn't quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak's board. Wanting to create a business. — Walter Isaacson

You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education. — Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson Quotes About Steve

Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there. — 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

Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance. — Walter Isaacson

By the end of his career, he [Steve Jobs] has proven that he can do the impossible, and he has gathered probably the most loyal team of eight players of any business in America. — Walter Isaacson

I have a strong emotional respect for Steve. — 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

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

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

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

Walter Isaacson Quotes About Important

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. — Walter Isaacson

I do think it's important, if you're going to be very creative, to be a seeker. — Walter Isaacson

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism. — Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson Famous Quotes And Sayings

I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it's a dumb word, but mental processing power - I've watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom. — Walter Isaacson

The Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive. — Walter Isaacson

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters. — Walter Isaacson

When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness. — Walter Isaacson

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. — Walter Isaacson

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

And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing. — 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

if you can't keep him interested, that's your fault. — Walter Isaacson

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

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

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. — Walter Isaacson

We relate to Leonardo da Vinci because his genius was just being passionately curious about everything. He wanted to know everything he could know about our universe, including how we fit into it. We can't all have a superhuman intellect like Albert Einstein's, but we can be super-curious. And we can also quit smashing curiosity out of the hands our children. — Walter Isaacson

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.' — Walter Isaacson

Innovation requires articulation. — 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

Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland. — 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

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. — Walter Isaacson

In the age of the internet when everybody's a pundit, we're still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that's very expensive. — Walter Isaacson

We are in a situation with the huge stimulus package that's going to be spent all across this nation and a big financial crisis and banking crisis. And what we need is good, trained journalists who can play the role of watchdog. — Walter Isaacson

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

We're all swimming in this digital revolution that we live in. — Walter Isaacson

I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably. — Walter Isaacson

It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people. — Walter Isaacson

I think Leonardo da Vinci teaches us the value of both being focused on things that fascinate us but also, at times, being distracted and deciding to pursue some shiny new idea that you happen to stumble upon. Balancing intense focus with being interested in a whole lot of different things is something that we have to do in the Internet age. — Walter Isaacson

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. — Walter Isaacson

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

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

Vision w/o execution is just hallucination. You need the right combination of visionary + team that can execute — 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. Excerpt From: Walter, Isaacson. “Steve Jobs.” Simon & Schuster, 2011-10-23T21:00:00+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright. — 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

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

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

I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did. 1 Apr 1976 — Walter Isaacson

I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong. — 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

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. — Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci was comfortable being illegitimate, gay, a misfit, a heretic. But he also respected other people. He didn't get into disputations. He was a genius but he had a certain humility. In his notebooks you see lists of people he wanted to grill about things like how the water diversions in Milan work; he was always interested in learning from other people. — Walter Isaacson

If you want to be a great American, you have got to understand Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, how the American Revolution happened. I think if you want to be a good citizen of the digital age, it helps to feel comfortable with both the people and the ways of thinking that created the digital revolution. — 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

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

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business. — 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

Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don't get that critical of a government that's leading us in war time. — Walter Isaacson

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

I think America is really well-positioned, because we do train people to be creative and sometimes resist authority, which helps in being an innovator. I think you're going to see for the next phase of the revolution all sorts of wonderful ways of connecting art and literature and journalism into new forms of digital expression. — Walter Isaacson

Life Lessons by Walter Isaacson

1. Walter Isaacson's work emphasizes the importance of collaboration and communication in achieving success. He encourages readers to be creative, open-minded, and to embrace a spirit of experimentation.
2. He also stresses the importance of taking risks, learning from failure, and having the courage to pursue one's passions.
3. Finally, Isaacson's work demonstrates the power of storytelling and the impact that a single individual can have on the world.