Quotes

Right now, there are brilliant students from all over the world sitting in classrooms at our top universities. They’re earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science. But once they finish school, once they earn that diploma, there’s a good chance they’ll have to leave our country. Think about that.

Intel was started with the help of an immigrant who studied here and then stayed here. Instagram was started with the help of an immigrant who studied here and then stayed here. Right now in one of those classrooms, there’s a student wrestling with how to turn their big idea—their Intel or Instagram—into a big business. We’re giving them all the skills they need to figure that out, but then we’re going to turn around and tell them to start that business and create those jobs in China or India or Mexico or someplace else? That’s not how you grow new industries in America. That’s how you give new industries to our competitors. That’s why we need comprehensive immigration reform.

Given how misguided the whole design of Windows 8 seems to be, why have tech journalists given it basically positive reviews? My theory is that journalists love anything new, different, and complicated. Windows 8 is all of those things.

Isaacson: Apple’s future as a company was one of the things that a year ago Steve was obsessed about. He had gone in at the end of August to tell the board that he was stepping down as CEO. And everybody on the board is very sad, and then they try to jolly things up, and they talk about how Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) had just gotten out of the tablet business that day, was screwing things up, and he said something like, “Wait a minute. Bill Hewlett gave me my first job. When I was 13 years old and needed a part, I called him from the phone book, and he gave me a summer job, and he and David Packard thought they’d made a company that was going to outlast them and continue to grow for a generation, and these bozos have screwed it up. Don’t let that happen to Apple.”

He said, “Here’s what’s in our DNA at Apple. We stand at the intersection of art and science; at the intersection of creativity and technology.” And he said, “That’s been in the DNA of great companies. That’s why Walt Disney (DIS) – even though people tried to screw up that company – it’s still going to survive.”

I think punditry serves no purpose. I don’t care if it has a future.

[Mitt Romney] has demonstrated, when he stepped into government in a very difficult state, that he could work in a difficult partisan environment, take some good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured. Those kind of ideas show an ability to bring people together that we haven’t seen in national politics for a while.

The assumption was that, um, the, the, ah, again — I probably can’t speak to that in an exact way so I better just not.

If you vote against Obama because he can’t get stuff done, it’s kind of like saying, ‘This guy can’t cure cancer. I’m gonna vote for cancer.’

I heard through the grapevine that Republican apparatchiks had lost control of the Romney speech, and now I can see what it was all about. Mitt Romney is thinking ‘If John McCain loses, the party is going to be tired of mavericks. They’ll want a hard right-winger, and that will be me!“ He drifted so far right, I’m sort of, my mind is boggling. Who was this guy? I remember a few years ago, a moderate Republican, but he’s made a strategic choice. That is as right-wing a speech as we’ll hear, maybe as right-wing a speech as we’ve heard at a Republican convention in many conventions.

He’d like the parts that are politically sensitive, which he does disagree with, to not own the whole thing. But he owns the major elements. He owns drastically reducing the size of the federal government, drastically changing how Medicare works, and drastically altering the tax code where the richest Americans would get a big tax break.

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.