Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens

Adolf Hitler polled highest as the "greatest living person." Albert Einstein was second.

But by 1912, Einstein had come to appreciate that math could be a tool for discovering—and not merely describing—nature's laws. Math was nature's playbook. "The central idea of general relativity is that gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime," says physicist James Hartle. "Gravity is geometry.

At the behest of Princeton's President, all of Einstein's lectures were very technical. They included more than one hundred and twenty-five complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, I sat in the balcony but he talked right over my head anyway.

Se dio cuenta, una vez más, de que Estados Unidos, pese a sus muestras de mal gusto y sus excesos de entusiasmo, le ofrecía libertades que puede que ya no encontrara en Europa.

Calling himself "an old-time believer in democracy," he again made clear that his socialist sentiments did not make him sympathetic to Soviet-style controls. "All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left," he said. Some

The Ethics of Genetic Control. "As we learn to direct mutations medically, we should do so. Not to control when we can is immoral.

When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two

My mind, having been much more improved by reading than Keimer's, I suppose it was for that reason my conversation seemed more valued. They had me to their houses, introduced me to their friends, and showed me much civility.

Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to the rules by which they are assigned to these objects. In other words, for a concept to make sense you need an operational definition of it, one that describes how you would observe the concept in operation.

he was practical about what he wanted in a wife. Deborah was rather plain, but she offered the prospect of comfort and domesticity.

It's harder, and less glorious, to realize that legitimate values sometimes conflict with one another, and they have to be balanced. This is not a talent that is exalted on talk radio or cable news shows. But the need to calibrate a proper balance among opposing principles is evident in every issue we face today, from abortion to heath-care reform to affirmative action.

The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two.

Sutil es el Señor, pero malicioso no lo es.

Los ordenadores de hoy son idiotas brillantes

fuerzas gravitatorias de Newton, por las que dos objetos se atraen mutuamente de manera directamente proporcional a su masa e inversamente proporcional a la distancia que los separa.

I am the same ardent pacifist I was before. But I believe that we can advocate refusing military service only when the military threat from aggressive dictatorships toward democratic countries has ceased to exist."66

This phenomenon, called time dilation, leads to what is known as the twin paradox.

He also speculated, correctly, that summer breezes do not by themselves cool people; instead, the cooling effect comes from the increased evaporation of human perspiration caused by the breeze.

Finally, on the day that he was scheduled to make the big announcement, Amelio called Jobs in. He needed an answer. "Steve, do you just want

simply enjoy giving more than receiving in every respect, do not take myself nor the doings of the masses seriously, am not ashamed of my weaknesses and vices, and naturally take things as they come with equanimity and humor.

She felt at home in the lab. It was a quiet temple for individual persistence and contemplation. She could be creative and independent as she pursued a path toward her own discoveries.

Los hombres de genio están, en realidad, haciendo lo más importante cuando menos trabajan —le dijo al duque—, puesto que meditan y perfeccionan las ideas que luego realizan con sus manos.

a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.