Quotes from Walter Isaacson

While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the "Deluge drawings" that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. "I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction," he replied.

It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.

We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years," recalled Powell. "We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, 'What is the purpose of a sofa?'

His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he'd ever read any of my books.

Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house.

Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place," Jobs said.

You have to remain critically vigilant." Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous.

He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of "trends" that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC's creed: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."60

Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Franklin was worried that his fondness for conversation and eagerness to impress made him prone to "prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company." Knowledge, he realized, "was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue." So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue.

He never really cared too much about mechanical things.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product.

You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.

thus isolated, he became known for his brashness.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think

You did the impossible, because you didn't realize it was impossible.

He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance," recalled Schiller. "That meant design and engineering had to work together.

One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. "As you go about town," he wrote in one of them, "constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows."1 For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt.

People don't invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.

Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.

Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I'd worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn't heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him