Quotes from Walter Isaacson

His usual pragmatic instincts fell prey to sentiments he had once tried to train himself to avoid, such as bitterness, wounded pride, emotionalism, and political fervor.

Es importante fomentar la individualidad —decía—, ya que solo el individuo puede producir las nuevas ideas.

In addition to such topics of debate, Franklin laid out a guide for the type of conversational contributions each member could usefully make. There were twenty-four in all, and because their practicality is so revealing of Franklin's purposeful approach, they are worth excerpting at length:

When a really great dream shows up," Page later said, "grab it!

Instead of injecting a weakened or partial version of the dangerous virus into humans, these new vaccines deliver a gene or piece of genetic coding that will guide human cells to produce, on their own, components of the virus.

En la pintura, las acciones de las figuras expresan, en todos los casos, la intención de su ánimo

The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit. Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he

A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills

La música, la naturaleza y Dios se entrelazaron en él formando un conjunto de sentimientos, una unidad moral, cuyo rastro jamás se desvanecería».

His fingerprints are all over today's technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.

The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a 'cosmological constant' to his equation for the expansion of the universe but then retracted it, may be vindicated by new research."58

Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno.

I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Industry and frugality," he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard's almanacs, are "the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.

Over the ensuing years, researchers would discover new forces in nature, besides electromagnetism and gravity, and also new particles. These would make Einstein's attempts at unification all the more complex. But he would find himself less familiar with the latest data in experimental physics, and he thus would no longer have the same intuitive feel for how to wrest from nature her fundamental principles.

As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to the difference personalities make.

each page was ranked by the number and quality of links coming into it, and the quality of these links was determined by the number and quality of links to the pages that originated them, and so on. "It's all recursive," Page explained. "It's all a big circle.

His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, "Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity." On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself.

Knowing when to stand firm on principle or when to find common ground with your fellow citizens is the most important, and also the most difficult, activity in a democracy. There's no simple formula for it. That is why it is so useful to have narratives...

She had succeeded where the other technician had failed. "It was an incredible moment, and it made me think I could do science.

A page has a high rank if the sum of the ranks of its backlinks is high. This covers both the case when a page has many backlinks and when a page has a few highly ranked backlinks.

There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another.