Walter Isaacson

"“Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it,” Atkinson says in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs."

"Friedland found Jobs fascinating as well. “He was always walking around barefoot,” he later told a reporter. “The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme.” Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. “One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.”"

"Jobs was also beginning to have a little trouble stomaching Friedland’s cult leader style. “Perhaps he saw a little bit too much of Robert in himself,”"

"“Let me tell you a story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. And that was the approach Jobs chose. “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”"

"if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”"

"“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”"

"“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”"

"“We learned to interpret ‘This is shit’ to actually be a question that means, ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it.’”"

"I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it."

"Steve Jobs’ breakthrough achievement was to create Apple as he envisioned it, to mould its DNA, charting its mission as a revolutionary digital simplifier. Under Jobs, Apple made devices never previously conceived, devices that are intuitive, superbly useful, beautiful, a joy to use. Walter Isaacson says that Jobs ‘built the world’s most creative company … to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.’"

"A. J. P. Taylor, Brad Stone, Andrew Roberts, Roy Jenkins, Winston Churchill (the author), David Cannadine, Robert Tombs, Walter Isaacson, Neal Gabler, Tom Cannon, Bob Dylan (the author), Ian Bell, Thomas Kuhn, Viktor Frankl, Robert Skidelsky, Victor Sebestyen, Nelson Mandela (the author), Peter Hain, Lindy Woodhead, A. N. Wilson, Andrew Welburn, John Campbell, Nancy Andreasen, Timothy Wilson and Max Gunther."