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I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Tough
Wonder
Bigs
Done
Things

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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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.
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.
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The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.
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The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.
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If you want to be a great American, you have got to understand Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, how the American Revolution happened. I think if you want to be a good citizen of the digital age, it helps to feel comfortable with both the people and the ways of thinking that created the digital revolution.
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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Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.
Walter Isaacson
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Mainly, the reason people who didn't succeed had trouble because they had trouble forming teams. They didn't know how to collaborate.
Walter Isaacson
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if you can't keep him interested, that's your fault.
Walter Isaacson
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Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
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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.
Walter Isaacson
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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.
Walter Isaacson
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If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.
Walter Isaacson
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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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Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.
Walter Isaacson
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If you act like you can do something, then it will work.
Walter Isaacson
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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.
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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Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.
Walter Isaacson
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Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.
Walter Isaacson