Quotes from Walter Isaacson

As [the company] has grown larger and larger, I have enjoyed my daily work less and less

The juxtaposition highlighted the shift from the interests of his father's generation. "Mr. McCollum felt that electronics class was the new auto shop." McCollum

Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself.

They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That's what I've always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

He never trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom.

Perhaps one reason that Piero did not legitimate Leonardo was that he hoped to have as his heir a son who would follow family tradition and become a notary, and it was already clear, by the time Leonardo turned twelve, that he was not so inclined

If a typewriter is antiquated, what does that make me?" she asked. There was an awkward pause. As Baez later told me, "As soon as I said it, I realized the answer was so obvious. The question just hung in the air. I was just horrified.

think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him more materialistic and careerist than his own. "When I went to school,it was right after the sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in,"he said. "Now students aren't even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much.

system. Jobs was furious that Google had decided to compete with Apple in the phone business. "We did not enter the search business," he said. "They

Si Von Neumann y su equipo hubieran seguido liderando las innovaciones y las hubiesen hecho de dominio público, ¿habría conducido ese modelo de desarrollo de código abierto a un progreso más rápido de los ordenadores?

school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a

Innovation happens in stages.

decided then to write this book. Jobs surprised me by readily acknowledging that he would have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance. "It's your book," he said. "I won't even read it." But later that fall he seemed to have second thoughts about cooperating and, though I didn't know it, was hit by another round of cancer complications. He stopped returning my calls, and I put the project aside for a while.

The republic was not, however, democratic or egalitarian. In fact, it was barely a republic. Exercising power from behind its façade was the Medici family, the phenomenally wealthy bankers who dominated Florentine politics and culture during the fifteenth century without holding office or hereditary title. (In the following century they became hereditary dukes, and lesser family members became popes.)

He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone." Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.

It was a bad day for viruses," Moderna's chair Afeyan says about the Sunday in November 2020 when he got the first word of the clinical trial results. "There was a sudden shift in the evolutionary balance between what human technology can do and what viruses can do. We may never have a pandemic again.

she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained. I decided

They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

something more finished. But Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay. After thirty days Apple was on the verge of being profitable. "We were able to build the boards more cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on parts," Jobs recalled. "So the fifty we sold to the Byte Shop almost

We all—in the end—die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

With his finely honed ability to see both beauty and ugliness, Leonardo was able to create a satirical combination in his grotesques. As he wrote in his notes for his treatise on painting, "If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies within his power to create them; and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, buffoonish, or ridiculous, or pitiable, he can be lord thereof." 20

Wozniak began to rankle at Jobs's style. "Steve was too tough on people. I wanted our company to feel like a family where we all had fun and shared whatever we made.

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.