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c863e08
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Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.'
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Walter Isaacson |
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1a64754
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The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.
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Walter Isaacson |
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f6569e9
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he was more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations than metaphysical abstractions or deductive proofs. The
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Walter Isaacson |
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732ff6b
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Another time, he was playing [chess] with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. "Ah," said the duchess, "we do not take Kings so." Replied Franklin in a famous quip: "We do in America."
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Walter Isaacson |
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5eea7b1
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The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law."40"
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Walter Isaacson |
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a7a2982
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The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. "Don't be so modest, Eddington!" said Silberstein. Replied Eddington, "On the contrary. I'm just wondering who the third might be."30"
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Walter Isaacson |
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78c5e3c
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It was a sunny day, and Einstein merrily played with the telescope's dials and instruments. Elsa came along as well, and it was explained to her that the equipment was used to determine the scope and shape of the universe. She reportedly replied, "Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope."
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Walter Isaacson |
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6b137f2
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Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
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Walter Isaacson |
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7a3f6ef
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Franklin ended his "Apology for Printers" with a fable about a father and son traveling with a donkey. When the father rode and made his son walk, they were criticized by those they met; likewise, they were criticized when the son rode and made the father walk, or when they both rode the donkey, or when neither did. So finally, they decided to throw the donkey off a bridge. The moral, according to Franklin, was that it is foolish to try to ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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969a01f
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After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can't believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing la..
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steve-jobs
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Walter Isaacson |
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c277233
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America's most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. "America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here," he told the socialist leader Norman Thomas."
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Walter Isaacson |
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003d847
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The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything," she wrote in her "Notes." "It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths." A century later this assertion would be dubbed "Lady Lovelace's Objection"
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Walter Isaacson |
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63e5375
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His son Peter Bucky happily spent time driving Einstein around, and he later wrote down some of his recollections in extensive notebooks. They provide a delightful picture of the mildly eccentric but deeply un-affected Einstein in his later years. Peter tells, for example, of driving in his convertible with Einstein when it suddenly started to rain. Einstein pulled off his hat and put it under his coat. When Peter looked quizzical, Einstein..
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funny
einstein-quotes
einstein-s-life
sarcastic-humor
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Walter Isaacson |
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dbe9938
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La ventaja competitiva de una sociedad no vendra de lo bien que se ensene en sus escuelas la multiplicacion y las tablas periodicas, sino de lo bien que se sepa estimular la imaginacion y la creatividad.
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science
life-lessons
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Walter Isaacson |
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e411e89
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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. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That's how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two..
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Walter Isaacson |
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94b6462
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l'immaginazione e piu importante della conoscenza>>.
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Walter Isaacson |
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786f202
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calculus
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Walter Isaacson |
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dfdee8c
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One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!' " he japed in 1951." --
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Walter Isaacson |
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226284a
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The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.
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Walter Isaacson |
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e327f6b
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By noting that she seems to listen but not speak, Bellincioni conveyed what makes the portrait so momentous: it captures the sense of an inner mind at work. Her emotions seem to be revealed, or at least hinted at, by the look in her eyes, the enigma of her smile, and the erotic way she clutches and caresses the ermine.
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Walter Isaacson |
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b249464
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macrocosm analogy began with his curiosity about why water, which should in theory tend to settle on the earth's surface, emerges from springs and flows into rivers at the top of mountains. The veins of the earth, he wrote, carry "the blood that keeps the mountains alive."
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Walter Isaacson |
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dfea26b
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Closely related are the entries in his bestiary, a compendium of short tales of animals and moral lessons based on their traits. Bestiaries were popular among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, and the spread of printing presses meant that many were reprinted in Italy beginning in the 1470s. Leonardo had a copy of the bestiary written by Pliny the Elder and three others by medieval compilers.
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Walter Isaacson |
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445ae5a
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it is clear that Leonardo was charming and attractive and had many friends. "His disposition was so lovable that he commanded everyone's affection," according to Vasari. "He was so pleasing in conversation that he attracted to himself the hearts of men." Paolo Giovio, a near contemporary who met Leonardo in Milan, similarly remembered his pleasant nature. "He was friendly, precise, and generous, with a radiant, graceful expression,"
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Walter Isaacson |
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19cb9e9
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Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge. Fully a third of Florence's population was literate, the highest rate in Europe. By embracing trade, it became a center of finance and a cauldron of ideas.
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Walter Isaacson |
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791ef52
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how the ability to make connections across disciplines--arts and sciences, humanities and technology--is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.
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Walter Isaacson |
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1f3672f
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Rather than try to conform, he made a point of being different, dressing and carrying himself as a dandy.
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Walter Isaacson |
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ac87c48
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No scientist before Leonardo had methodically shown how birds stay aloft. Most had simply embellished on Aristotle, who mistakenly thought that birds were supported by air the way ships were by water.12 Leonardo realized that keeping aloft in air requires fundamentally different dynamics than doing so in water, because birds are heavier than air and are thus subject to being pulled down by gravity. The first two folios of his Codex on the F..
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Walter Isaacson |
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28c36e5
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See how the wings, striking against the air, sustain the heavy eagle in the thin air on high," he noted, then added, "As much force is exerted by the object against the air as by the air against the object."16 Two hundred years later, Newton would state a refined version of this as his third law of motion: "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."
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Walter Isaacson |
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7094932
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Another analogy he made was comparing the way that light, sound, magnetism, and the percussion reverberations caused by a hammer blow all disseminate in a radiating pattern, often in waves. In one of his notebooks he made a column of small drawings showing how each force field spreads. He even illustrated what happened when each type of wave hits a small hole in the wall; prefiguring the studies done by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens al..
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Walter Isaacson |
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0bff186
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When birds are descending near the ground and the head is below the tail, they lower the tail, which is spread wide open, and take short strokes with the wings; consequently, the head is raised above the tail, and the speed is checked so that the bird can alight on the ground without a shock."9 Ever notice all that?"
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Walter Isaacson |
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1b45987
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Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
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Walter Isaacson |
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c0154b9
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I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
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Walter Isaacson |
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6fdcbe0
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Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge.
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Walter Isaacson |
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e720470
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You may discover in the patterns on the wall a resemblance to various landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could turn into complete and well-drawn forms. The effect produced by these mottled walls is like that of the sound of bells, in which..
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Walter Isaacson |
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45dd53a
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Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate--Ei..
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Walter Isaacson |
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ecb57f6
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Suddenly Einstein jumped up. "What are you doing?" he demanded. "Are you boiling the liver in water?" Mrs. Frank allowed that was indeed what she was doing. "The boiling-point of water is too low," Einstein declared. "You must use a substance with a higher boiling-point such as butter or fat." From then on, Mrs. Frank referred to the necessity of frying liver as "Einstein's theory."
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Walter Isaacson |
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bd4b091
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The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him--the United States government," Einstein said."
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Walter Isaacson |
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437ee27
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Einstein was not used to self-righting political systems. Nor did he fully appreciate how resilient America's democracy and its nurturing of individual liberty could be. So for a while his disdain deepened. But he was saved from serious despair by his wry detachment and his sense of humor. He was not destined to die a bitter man.
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Walter Isaacson |
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25a2aad
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He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.
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Walter Isaacson |
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bf40d3e
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The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people,
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Walter Isaacson |
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1e9b7b6
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Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first, and that which was there is no more.
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Walter Isaacson |
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5ce475b
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The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain.
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Walter Isaacson |
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461900b
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His unstoppable curiosity triumphed, and Leonardo went into the cave. There he discovered, embedded in the wall, a fossil whale. "Oh mighty and once-living instrument of nature," he wrote, "your vast strength was to no avail."26 Some scholars have assumed that he was describing a fantasy hike or riffing on some verses by Seneca. But his notebook page and those surrounding it are filled with descriptions of layers of fossil shells, and many ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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ddd144f
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His scientific understanding of optics thus enhanced the three-dimensional illusion of the painting.8
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Walter Isaacson |