Quote

One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Cannot
Emotional
Construction
Dreariness
Find
Personal
Memorable
Whirlpool
Make
Security
Motive
Pivot
Men
Peace
Strongest
Whirlpools
Life
Experience
Escape
Motives
Science
Leads
Cosmos
Art
Painful
Narrow
Order
Everyday
Hopeless

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Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.
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Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book. (Steven Levy)
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Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.
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On Startups: I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.
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We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.
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One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
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I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
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i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
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What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
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Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.
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It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.
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Let's crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books
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Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.
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Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
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I think that we shouldn't be fixated all the time on the ups and downs of the weekly ratings, of the quarter-hour ratings.
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I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.
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And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.
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I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)
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When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.
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Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.
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