Quotes by Walter Isaacson

About Walter Isaacson:

Walter Isaacson is an American writer and biographer. He is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. He has been the chairman and CEO of Cable News Network (CNN) and the Managing Editor of Time. He has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom a...

Walter Isaacson

As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his personality

Walter Isaacson

Steve's sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling," according to Amelio. " He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Oliver as Macbeth.

Walter Isaacson

Steve's head dropped and stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. " Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" S...

Walter Isaacson

The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme." Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. " One of his numbers was to stare at the perso...

Walter Isaacson

When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. " People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, an...

Walter Isaacson

One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a lapto...

Walter Isaacson

We kind of missed the boat on that," he recalled. " So we needed to catch up real fast." The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it find itself behind.

Walter Isaacson

I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when i also didn't have...

Walter Isaacson

Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we bot...

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

Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must "impute"- it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company's stores. " The store will becom...

Walter Isaacson

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the mo...

Walter Isaacson

Although Jobs later said that he was not plotting to take over Apple at the time, Ellison thought it was inevitable. " Anyone who spent more than a half hour with Amelio would realize that he couldn't do anything but self destruct," he later said

Walter Isaacson

One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to "have skin in the game" and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year.” Jobs resisted. Finally, they compromised: Job...

Walter Isaacson

In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, " Memento Mori": Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero ke...

Walter Isaacson

One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to "have skin in the game" and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year.

Walter Isaacson

The unified field theory that ties together Jobs personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was ...

Walter Isaacson

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, perso...

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameWalter Isaacson
  • DescriptionAmerican writer and biographer
  • BornMay 20, 1952
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Writer
  • AwardsThe Nichols-Chancellor's Medal