Quotes from Walter Isaacson

I was on one of my fruitarian diets Steve Jobs recalled I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did.  1 Apr 1976 

I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality

Knowledge, he realized, "was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.

The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme. Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.

Steve's head dropped and stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world? Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other than to acquiesce. He had a uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person, Sculley recalled.

Customers don't know what they want until we've shown them.

It takes a lot of hard work," he said, "to make something simple

In classic Steve fashion, he would agree to something, but it would never happen," said Lack. "He would set you up and then pull it off the table. He's pathological, which can be useful in negotiations. And he's a genius.

We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

There's an old Hindu saying that goes, 'In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.' Come help me celebrate mine.

There would be times when we'd rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we'd considered every option, and he would go, Did you think of this? said Fadell. And then we'd all go, Holy Shit. He'd redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.

The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.

In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

People know how to deal with a desktop intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk. The one on the top is the most important. People know how to switch priority. Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.

If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake," he said. "Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister." Freedom was a foundation for creativity.

When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being "worth thousands and thousands of dollars," and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price: "We're going to be charging higher education a single price of $6,500.

When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.

I don't have any skeletons in my closet that can't be allowed out.

Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going," he wrote in 1510. "Practice must always be founded on sound theory."11

I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics," he said. "Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.

It is tasteless to prolong life artificially," he told Dukas. "I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.

Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker's code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.