Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

I 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.

I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.

Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.

One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters.

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

I think that we shouldn't be fixated all the time on the ups and downs of the weekly ratings, of the quarter-hour ratings.

Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there.

We are in a situation with the huge stimulus package that's going to be spent all across this nation and a big financial crisis and banking crisis. And what we need is good, trained journalists who can play the role of watchdog.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.

Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.

You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.

I think when you're looking for people to interview, you want to make it fair and honest. You're not just bringing people on so you can beat them up or, you know, make fools out of them or something

I've asked Jobs why he didn't get an operation then and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened... I didn't want to be violated in that way.'

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.

I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.

But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.