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Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Control
People
Pretend
Assume
Assuming
Completely

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)
Walter Isaacson
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I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.
Walter Isaacson
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I think Leonardo da Vinci teaches us the value of both being focused on things that fascinate us but also, at times, being distracted and deciding to pursue some shiny new idea that you happen to stumble upon. Balancing intense focus with being interested in a whole lot of different things is something that we have to do in the Internet age.
Walter Isaacson
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You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.
Walter Isaacson
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I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
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Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.
Walter Isaacson
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Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.
Walter Isaacson
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There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth
Walter Isaacson
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The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.
Walter Isaacson
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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.
Walter Isaacson
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Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car.
Walter Isaacson
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I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant
Walter Isaacson
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I don't think there was enough skepticism because I think most of us kind of believed that Saddam Hussein was building biological, chemical, and perhaps even, nuclear weapons.
Walter Isaacson
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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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A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.
Walter Isaacson
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Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
Walter Isaacson
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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.
Walter Isaacson
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More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.
Walter Isaacson
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I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.
Walter Isaacson
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Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Walter Isaacson