Walter Isaacson Quote
I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God, he said. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. I like to think that something survives after you die, he said. It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures. He fell silent for a very long time. But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch, he said. Click! And you’re gone. Then he paused again and smiled slightly. Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God, he said. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. I like to think that something survives after you die, he said. It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures. He fell silent for a very long time. But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch, he said. Click! And you’re gone. Then he paused again and smiled slightly. Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.