The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.
McCollum believed in military.
He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.
Pauli Murray perfected two characteristics of leadership: indomitable persistence and relentless self-invention.
As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep,” Leonardo had written thirty years earlier, “so a well-employed life brings a happy death.
Despite the fact that Murray was one of the preeminent civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, most people have never heard of her. She achieved her leadership role and her success in subverting white supremacy by learning from her failures and capitalizing on the most incremental successes.
What drives people to do good things is recognition.
There is some difference between them and sheep: Sheep will never make any insurrections.
Never an insider, Murray used her outsider status to make herself a thorn in the side of segregation and political oppression.
He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed.
And you can’t win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate to customers.
The best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world: filled with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders.
Freedom was a foundation for creativity.
After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled into the parking lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a hundred new Macintosh computers, each personalized with a plaque. “Steve presented them one at a time to each team member, with a handshake and a smile, as the rest of us stood around cheering,” Hertzfeld recalled.
Most of us someday will have detection devices in our home that will allow us to check for viruses and many other conditions.
Do not be seduced by feelings that a dictatorship of the proletariat is temporarily needed.
He who is abandoned is an abandoner.
Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.
Hey, if we’re going to make things in our life, we might as well make them beautiful.
Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.