Walter Isaacson

“You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education.”

“He said, 'From then on, I realized that I was not just abandoned. I was chosen. I was special.' And I think that's the key to understanding Steve Jobs.”

“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.”

“I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.”

“He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.”

“I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.”

“Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

“I do think it's important, if you're going to be very creative, to be a seeker.”

“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.”

“But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.”

“Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.”

“There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.”

“Form follows emotion”

“Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there.”

“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.”