Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Among Republicans, we trailed only the military and local police; among Democrats, we were at the top, leading every branch of government, universities, and the press.

In his competition with Bradford, Franklin had one big disadvantage. Bradford was the postmaster of Philadelphia, and he used that position to deny Franklin the right, at least officially, to send his Gazette through the mail. Their ensuing struggle over the issue of open carriage was an early example of the tension that often still exists between those who create content and those who control distribution systems.

He was the only person to sign all four of its founding papers: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, the peace accord with Britain, and the Constitution.

I don't think that I would be me if I didn't have sickle cell.

The Bush-Licklider approach was given a friendly interface by Engelbart, who in 1968 demonstrated a networked computer system with an intuitive graphical display and a mouse.

You can invent your way to a better place.

Electrical fluid is attracted by points. We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they agree in all particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this?" To which he added a momentous rallying cry: "Let the experiment be made.

Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years," says NIH director Francis Collins, who is not an atheist. "Do we really think that some small group of human genome tinkerers could do better without all sorts of unintended consequences?

He told her, somewhat emotionally, that he wished she could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San José. That was a wonderful place, he said. All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs. (......) Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, Steve Jobs is your son!

The most acceptable service to God is doing good to man.

From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled, with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.

Einstein's pacifism, world federalism, and aversion to nationalism were part of a political outlook that also included a passion for social justice, a sympathy for underdogs, an antipathy toward racism, and a predilection toward socialism.

Einstein's goal as he pursued his general theory of relativity was to find the mathematical equations describing two complementary processes: 1. How a gravitational field acts on matter, telling it how to move. 2. And in turn, how matter generates gravitational fields in spacetime, telling it how to curve. His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor. For more than three years he

In-person interactions are especially important in the initial brainstorming of new ideas and the forging of personal bonds.

He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

Math was nature's playbook.

It's time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.

A secret to being more revered than resented, he learned, was to display (at least when he could muster the discipline) a self-deprecating humor, unpretentious demeanor, and unaggressive style in conversation.

more than a minute. The wilderness decade was over. Finally Jobs waved for silence and cut to the heart of the challenge. "We've got to get the spark back," he said. "The Mac didn't progress much in ten years. So Windows caught up. So we have to come up with an OS that's even better.

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.

If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.

Nature is pleased with simplicity

Future generations will figure out the details.

Talmud brought him science books, including a popular illustrated series called People's Books on Natural Science