Quotes from Walter Isaacson

He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people," Kissinger once said of Rockefeller. "I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.

When you help build something, you own it, you're vested in it. That's far more rewarding than having it handed down to you."111

Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs," he wrote Weizmann in 1929, "then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.

La sencillez es la máxima sofisticación».

Public awareness is an important component of innovation.

The beauty of nature and the joy that comes from unstructured human engagement is a powerful combination.

Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.

People don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Creo que las distintas religiones son puertas diferentes para una misma casa. A veces creo que la casa existe, y otras veces que no. Ese es el gran misterio.

Loyalty to a party, Einstein felt, meant surrendering some independence of thought. Such conformity confounded him. "How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery

In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.

When people take insights from multiple sources and put them together, it's natural for them to think that the resulting ideas are their own—as

Gates was the prime example of the innovator's personality. "An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed as a bit imbalanced," he said. "Certainly in my teens and 20s, I fit that model.

This isn't about replacing human thinking with machine thinking. Rather, in the era of cognitive systems, humans and machines will collaborate to produce better results, each bringing their own superior skills to the partnership

If there is no love, what then?

A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

America's most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. "America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here," he told the socialist leader Norman Thomas.

Thus he became the archetype of the Renaissance Man, an inspiration to all who believe that the "infinite works of nature," as he put it, are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous patterns.2 His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportioned man spread-eagle inside a circle and square, known as Vitruvian Man, made him history's most creative genius.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.

The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting traits: a leader is either very inclusive or a passionate visionary. But the best leaders could be both. Robert

Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were "selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.

Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after.

Ada's ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.