Quotes from Walter Isaacson

I very rarely think in words at all

insight, the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that was better.

George Brownell. Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.

Mojica was driving home from his lab one evening when he came up with the name CRISPR, for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.

The obvious yet still astonishing conclusion: with no such thing as absolute simultaneity, there is no such thing as "real" or absolute time.

Simplicity and unity, he intuitively believed, were hallmarks of the Old One's handiwork. A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different things it relates, and the more expanded its area of applicability, he wrote.

Whenever peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. Whenever the international order has acknowledged that certain principles could not be compromised even for the sake of peace, stability based on an equilibrium of forces was at least conceivable.

To him, marriage was confining, which was a state he instinctively resisted.

Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

Before getting into CRISPR, Zayner tried a variety of synthetic biology experiments, including on himself. To treat his gastrointestinal problems, he performed a fecal transplant (don't ask) to transform his gut's microbiome. He did the procedure in a hotel room with two filmmakers documenting the scene, and (in case you really do want to know how it works) it became a short documentary called Gut Hack that can be found online.2

Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.

El valor de una educación universitaria no es el aprendizaje de muchos datos, sino el entrenamiento de la mente para pensar

As a master of the relationship between power and diplomacy, Franklin knew that it would be impossible to win at the negotiating table what was unwinnable on the battlefield.

The conception of the ether has again acquired an intelligible content, although this content differs widely from that of the ether of the mechanical wave theory of light… According to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, there exists an ether.

There was a simple set of formulas that defined Einstein's outlook. Creativity required being willing not to conform. That required nurturing free minds and free spirits, which in turn required a spirit of tolerance. And the underpinning of tolerance was humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

The dark side of our new information technology is not that it allows government repression of free speech but just the opposite: it permits anyone to spread, with little risk of being held accountable, any idea, conspiracy, lie, hatred, scam, or scheme, with the result that societies become less civil and governable.

When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair," he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, "one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater.

Einstein's 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science's best known equation.

Upon the whole, I am much disposed to like the world as I find it, and to doubt my own judgment as to what would mend it.

You make an invention you think is great, and so you want it to be used by many people as soon as possible.

Someday we may consider it unethical not to use germline editing to alleviate human suffering.

The most controversial player was the wild and abrasive Craig Venter, who had worked in a U.S. Navy field hospital as a draftee during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War

HOW TO EXPLAIN the striking contrast between Eisenhower's sweepingly successful leadership of the Allied cause in Europe during World War II and his disappointing failure to provide leadership to the cause of civil rights as president?