Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Jobs's pep talk could have been

Those sentences are somewhat clotted

The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. "This is the most important moment in my entire life," he told Sculley as they waited backstage for the program to begin. "I'm really nervous. You're probably the only person who knows how I feel about this." Sculley grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered "Good luck.

never could, and he was able to avoid having too many bozos working

AOL's users were not called customers or subscribers; they were members.

When you see a beautiful woman, what do you feel?" Wayne replied, "It's like when you look at a beautiful horse. You can appreciate it, but you don't want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it is." Wayne said that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him.

hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because he had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal was the same

He was able to avoid pedantry by regularly bringing his theories down to earth, so to speak, and tying them to practical applications. As he instructed himself in a typical notebook jotting, "When you put together the science of the motions of water, remember to include under each proposition its application, in order that this science may not be useless."15

Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.

the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

You ought to kill Newton," he told Amelio one day by phone.

six feet tall, with a passing resemblance

a good company must "impute"—it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing.

The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.

In his excitement, Jobs began to take over the daily management of the Lisa project, which was being run by John Couch, the former HP engineer.

Online services such as AOL developed independently of the Internet.

We had to learn their vocabularies in order to be able to run their problems. I could switch my vocabulary and speak highly technical for the programmers, and then tell the same things to the managers a few hours later but with a totally different vocabulary." Innovation requires articulation.

This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of 'free speech,' not 'free beer.' " For

His notebooks have been rightly called "the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.

The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it

the world are the ones who do. —Apple's "Think Different" commercial

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently," he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking.

Art Levinson, who was on Apple's board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs's name appeared on the screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove

you just don't want someone else to control a big part of the user experience. People may disagree with me, but I am pretty consistent about that.