A large, interconnected population meant faster cumulative invention – a surprising truth even to this day, as Hong Kong and Manhattan islands demonstrate.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

When people who run bureaucracies balk at change, they are usually acting in the service of what they think is right. Many of the rules that people find onerous and bureaucratic were put in place to...

All those who'd volunteered to be "idea advocates" were called in to work with Tom and his team to hone their pitches. Then, they began making them to me, John, and our general manager, Jim Morris -...

Without a scientist, there is no future. The handsome and attractive characters may earn society's admiration, but all the wonderful inventions related to the future are the result of the work of...

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

Robert Goddard, the father of American rocket science

Most breakthroughs in performance {and appearance} enhancement start with animals and go through the following adoption curve: Racehorses → AIDS patients {because of muscle wasting} and bodybuilders...

Eddy Cue, who was in charge of the store, predicted that Apple would sell a million songs in six months. Instead, the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six days.

That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between...

Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question of its contentious history, along with the name of...

Many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

The Innovators, Isaacson later

New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world.

Don't worry. We'll farm, soon's he finishes with that new-style Scanran fertilizer.

Einstein famously said if at first an idea is not absurd, there's no hope for it.

If good management practice drives the failure of successful firms faced with disruptive technological change, then the usual answers to companies' problems—planning better, working harder, becoming...

You can only shape the experiences that are important to your customers when you understand who you are really competing with.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns...

It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal...