Quotes from 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

Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.

He also noted that the veins of humans narrow with age, but the springs and rivers of the earth continually enlarge their channels.30

Use for yourself little," he said, "but give to others much."26

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe. It also symbolizes an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity, value, and rational agency of humans as individuals. Inside the square and the circle we can see the essence of Leonardo da Vinci, and the essence of ourselves, standing naked at the intersection of the earthly and the cosmic.

Religion was at it's best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith, rather than living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it, he told me. I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's a great mystery.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.

Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present.

You shouldn't whitewash it. He's good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I'd like to see that it's all told truthfully.

History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.

I think my blunt and contrary nature helps my science, because I don't simply accept things just because other people believe it

But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone's look and feel. That was the context for Jobs's pronouncement that Google's "Don't be evil" slogan was "bullshit.

Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don't know how it works. They don't fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination."8

Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm.

If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.

Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it.

He lies not because it's in his interest, he lies because it's in his nature." It was in Jobs's nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was warranted.

But when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955—the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out.

Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled "On the Laboring Poor," which he signed "Medius