Best Walter Isaacson Quotes

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

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

A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.

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

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

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

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he [Einstein] said.

To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

How did he get his ideas? I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty, he said, at least for me.

He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.

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

Innovation requires articulation.

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.

Most of the collaborations of technology were done by teams...Collaboration is key to creativity.

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.

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.

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

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

With the participation of a wide range of policymakers - from Margaret Thatcher to Jimmy Carter to Condoleezza Rice - it has helped lay the groundwork for new approaches to national and world issues.

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.

There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.

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

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

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

I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you're more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish.

Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I'm pretty sure I could make out, 'Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!

Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.