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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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You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.
Walter Isaacson
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Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
Walter Isaacson
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I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.
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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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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Vision w/o execution is just hallucination. You need the right combination of visionary + team that can execute
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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The Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive.
Walter Isaacson
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Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.
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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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.
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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For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence.
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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for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.
Walter Isaacson
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When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.
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)
Walter Isaacson
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Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
Walter Isaacson
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Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.
Walter Isaacson