Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Durante los primeros años después de Pearl Harbor, los Laboratorios Bell se hicieron cargo de casi mil proyectos distintos para el ejército, desde equipos de radio para tanques hasta sistemas de comunicaciones para pilotos que llevaban máscaras de oxígeno, pasando por máquinas de cifrado para codificar mensajes secretos.

At the age of 31, he had five children to raise, a trade to tend, and a shop to keep. He needed a robust new wife, and he needed her quickly.

Tengo semejante fe en el ser humano que creo que hablar con las personas es mucho más importante que esforzarse en averiguar qué es lo que quieren hacer

To Joseph Priestley, he provided a bit of math for one of their friends to ponder: "Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head . . . During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all.

A decade after that, in 1915, he wrested from nature his crowning glory, one of the most beautiful theories in all of science, the general theory of relativity.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being

Kissinger once said of Israel's Moshe Dayan that he was "a brilliant manipulator of people and yet emotionally dependent on them.

El respeto ciego por la autoridad es el mayor enemigo de la verdad.

Franklin's birthplace on Milk Street in Boston, across from the Old South Church.

In explaining the amazing mechanisms of life, little things matter. And very little things matter a lot.

Todo conocimiento de la realidad parte de la experiencia y acaba en ella.

As a result, Born was dismayed when it was announced in 1920 that Einstein had cooperated on a forthcoming biography by a Jewish journalist, Alexander Moszkowski, who had mainly written humor and occult books.

He named these "CRISPR-associated," or Cas, enzymes.

society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity. Therein

Perhaps you imagine the Negroes to be a mild tempered, tractable kind of people. Some of them are indeed so. But the majority are of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel in the highest degree."23

The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson's phrase "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: "We hold these truths to be self-evident.

By early 1778, Voltaire was 84 and ailing, and there had even been stories that he had died. (His retort, even better than Mark Twain's similar one, was that the reports were true, only premature.)

seiscientas cincuenta y siete clases de agua y de sus profundidades.

It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.

What none of the participants discussed was a longer-range prospect: using CRISPR to engineer inheritable edits in humans that would make our children, and all of our descendants, less vulnerable to virus infections. These genetic improvements could permanently alter the human race.

As the Nazis continued to lose national elections but increase their share of the vote, the octogenarian president, Paul von Hindenburg, selected as chancellor the bumbling Franz von Papen, who tried to rule through martial authority. When Philipp Frank came to visit him in Caputh that summer, Einstein lamented, "I am convinced that a military regime will not prevent the imminent National Socialist [Nazi] revolution."13 As

He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.

Reasonable, sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men.

He was known to leave behind clothes, and sometimes even his suitcase, when he traveled, and his inability to remember his keys became a running joke with his landlady. He once visited the home of family friends and, he recalled, "I left forgetting my suitcase. My host said to my parents, 'That man will never amount to anything because he can't remember anything.