Steven Johnson quote: "Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies."

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the bou...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Chance favors the connected mind.
STEVEN JOHNSON

Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chai...
STEVEN JOHNSON

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of ...
STEVEN JOHNSON

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes fro...
STEVEN JOHNSON

In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn...
STEVEN JOHNSON

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected ...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreak...
STEVEN JOHNSON

We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whet...
STEVEN JOHNSON

It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the ...
STEVEN JOHNSON

What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse netwo...
STEVEN JOHNSON

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's...
STEVEN JOHNSON

[Television is] demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year, ... Everything Bad is Go...
STEVEN JOHNSON

The most debased forms of mass diversion - video games and violent television dramas and juvenile si...
STEVEN JOHNSON

The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.
STEVEN JOHNSON

Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously hist...
STEVEN JOHNSON

If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to...
STEVEN JOHNSON

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of ...
STEVEN JOHNSON

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining pa...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
STEVEN JOHNSON

It's a lot harder to just throw up some HTML.
STEVEN JOHNSON

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoug...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacation...
STEVEN JOHNSON

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transc...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the great...
STEVEN JOHNSON

What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the mo...
STEVEN JOHNSON

The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the...
STEVEN JOHNSON

A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync wit...
STEVEN JOHNSON

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in ...
STEVEN JOHNSON

His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big citie...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle phys...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
STEVEN JOHNSON

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve t...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this progra...
STEVEN JOHNSON

So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
STEVEN JOHNSON

when one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ide...
STEVEN JOHNSON

the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
STEVEN JOHNSON

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good fo...
STEVEN JOHNSON

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
STEVEN JOHNSON

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinv...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
STEVEN JOHNSON

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the net...
STEVEN JOHNSON

Everything you do in life, every choice you make, has a consequence. When you do things without thin...
MARK STEVEN JOHNSON

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, i...
JOHNSON

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely ne...
JOHNSON

He that never thinks can never be wise.
JOHNSON

The true sound and strong mind is the one that can embrace equally great and small things.
JOHNSON

Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon t...
JOHNSON

To hear complaints is tiresome to the miserable and the happy.
JOHNSON

When a person finds themselves predisposed to complaining about how little they are regarded by othe...
JOHNSON

When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complai...
JOHNSON

Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it.
JOHNSON

Language is the pedigree of nations.
JOHNSON

If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that...
JOHNSON

There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in co...
JOHNSON

If what happens does not make us richer, we must welcome it if it makes us wiser.
JOHNSON

No one will persist long in helping someone who will not help themselves.
JOHNSON

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but...
JOHNSON

To have gold is to be in fear, and to want it to be sorrow.
JOHNSON

Try and forget our cares and sickness, and contribute, as we can to the happiness of each other.
JOHNSON

He that undervalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them...
JOHNSON

Language is the dress of thought.
JOHNSON

Confidence is a plant of slow growth; especially in an aged bosom.
JOHNSON

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memo...
JOHNSON

We are concerned with that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negati...
STEVEN BIKO

Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands ...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

I'm very fond of the British cinema. I'm a big fan of Martin Campbell and Daniel Craig. I ac...
STEVEN BAUER

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industr...
STEVEN LEVY

Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
STEVEN PINKER

I think I look really weird with short hair. So I figured if I've got a mustache, I think it loo...
STEVEN ADAMS

The gift that has been given to me says much about our capacity for great compassion and generosity,...
STEVEN COJOCARU

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel...
STEVEN PINKER

Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street,...
STEVEN SEAGAL

No industry is immune and no occupation is safe. All of us need to begin to think in terms of our ow...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft. I am humbled by ...
STEVEN SINOFSKY

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push ...
STEVEN PINKER

Courtney Love is a loose cannon. She says what she thinks. She's wild on the red carpet. You get...
STEVEN COJOCARU

Black Consciousness seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their ...
STEVEN BIKO

When I was on TV in the '80s, I wasn't thinking, 'There's a 10-year-old kid watching...
STEVEN WRIGHT

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare...
STEVEN RATTNER

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological pro...
STEVEN PINKER

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.
STEVEN WRIGHT

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. ...
STEVEN WRIGHT

'The Color Purple' is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is...
STEVEN SODERBERGH

I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure.
STEVEN CHU

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools fo...
STEVEN PINKER

Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies o...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded wit...
STEVEN BOCHCO

The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and univ...
STEVEN PINKER

I was born with this. It's a hereditary genetic condition. This is something you can go your who...
STEVEN COJOCARU

I think there is a way to be formal and elegant and classy, but more modern. Brad Pitt has been chan...
STEVEN COJOCARU

I mean, as long as it doesn't have a bra attached, guys can take a risk and wear stylish things ...
STEVEN TYLER

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. ...
STEVEN WRIGHT

If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you str...
STEVEN WRIGHT

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speec...
STEVEN PINKER

The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalis...
STEVEN PINKER

A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space...
STEVEN WRIGHT

If you cannot peacefully coexist with many different cultures and beliefs, then you should probably ...
STEVEN MAGEE

Many past mistakes paves the road to future discoveries.
STEVEN MAGEE

There is a dedication to willful incompetence in many corporate government departments.
STEVEN MAGEE

An electrical utility company that blatantly lies to law enforcement about an electrical fraud resea...
STEVEN MAGEE

Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either dam...
STEVEN MAGEE

The USA is corrupt in many areas with law enforcement and utility companies being two of those.
STEVEN MAGEE

There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surv...
STEVEN MAGEE

The Industrial Revolution appears to be in its final stages and it will be remembered as a time wher...
STEVEN MAGEE

Many mistakes makes for a very smart person.
STEVEN MAGEE

This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"
The philosopher replied without an insta...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

A country that publicly threatens to completely destroy another nation should not be surprised when ...
STEVEN MAGEE

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
STEVEN SPIELBERG

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that...
STEVEN PINKER

A Black man should be more independent and depend on himself for his freedom and not to take it for ...
STEVEN BIKO

We're stunned by the diversity of rocks. This stuff looks like it was put into a blender.
STEVEN SQUYRES

The police seem to be learning the hard way that the more abusive they are to people, the less peopl...
STEVEN MAGEE

Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have com...
STEVEN BIKO

The backbone of the electrical grid is largely massive numbers of steam driven engines that turn ele...
STEVEN MAGEE

Very few people realize that the ionizing radiation levels on a commercial jet airplane at cruising ...
STEVEN MAGEE

The universe is big, its vast and complicated, and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossibl...
STEVEN MOFFAT

I’m so tired... I was up all night trying to round off infinity.
STEVEN WRIGHT

I dread having to call the police, as I have no idea if they will send good cop, bad cop, lying cop,...
STEVEN MAGEE

The gifts of the Master are these: freedom, life, hope, new direction, transformation, and intimacy ...
STEVEN JAMES

Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thought for a moment longer, then scowled. On se...
STEVEN ERIKSON

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.
STEVEN SPIELBERG

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.
STEVEN WRIGHT

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
STEVEN WEINBERG

Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun
When a good man g...
STEVEN MOFFAT

Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the
initiative and thus com...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

Hitler: Thank you, whoever you are. I think you just saved my life.
The Doctor: Believe me... I...
STEVEN MOFFAT

The most deformed AC voltage sine wave that I have seen in my career was at a high altitude astronom...
STEVEN MAGEE

The toxicity of an electrical wiring error is a function of the dirty electricity and the electrical...
STEVEN MAGEE

Most people do not realize that they are one car crash away from death.
STEVEN MAGEE

When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repet...
STEVEN KOTLER

It is a sad state of affairs in the USA that for the sick and the poor that jail offers better benef...
STEVEN MAGEE

I regard the USA mass population routinely flip-flopping between the Republican and Democratic parti...
STEVEN MAGEE

Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.
STEVEN ERIKSON

We're all stories, in the end.
STEVEN MOFFAT

Always speak politely to an enraged dragon.
STEVEN BRUST

When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run ...
STEVEN MOFFAT

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been ...
STEVEN MILLHAUSER

Change is not always a good thing. What I need is not change from one thing to another but transform...
STEVEN JAMES

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that...
STEVEN HALPERN

I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.
STEVEN SPIELBERG

If we can't figure something out in three weeks, we probably shouldn't bother.
STEVEN GILBERT

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil th...
STEVEN WEINBERG

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
STEVEN WRIGHT

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.
STEVEN SODERBERGH

It doesn't work if the bad guys kill his mother's uncle's friend's neighbor's pet dog. You've got to...
STEVEN SEAGAL

Every life has a measure of sorrow, and sometimes this is what awakens us.
STEVEN TYLER

A cavalryman's horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be alowed to know this.
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

Black holes are where God divided by zero.
STEVEN WRIGHT

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things...
STEVEN WEINBERG

One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it h...
STEVEN DEITZ

Winny and I lived in a house that ran on static electricity... If you wanted to run the blender, yo...
STEVEN WRIGHT

The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.
STEVEN CHU

Beginnings are often scary, endings are often sad, but it's the middle that counts. You should reme...
STEVEN ROGERS

I xeroxed my watch. Now I can give away free watches.
STEVEN WRIGHT

I xeroxed a mirror. Now I have an extra xerox machine.
STEVEN WRIGHT

A people who's primary aims are driving, shopping, and television are subject to terrorism at any ti...
STEVEN DEITZ

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usua...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

My parents taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you l...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It's not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It'...
STEVEN CHU

Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is on...
STEVEN PINKER

If it wasn't for KISS, there would be no Guns N' Roses. Bands like that made Guns N' Ros...
STEVEN ADLER

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with in...
STEVEN PINKER

Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a prete...
STEVEN PINKER

Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to c...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than t...
STEVEN PINKER

Sometimes, I seem to be only able to actually move and get going with things on the razor edge of po...
STEVEN HALL

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
STEVEN WRIGHT

What about the accusation that Hollywood is trying to advance its liberal agenda? Well, the fact is,...
STEVEN LEVITAN

For me, anything can be music! I can get huge enjoyment and be moved totally by the purity and perfe...
STEVEN PRICE

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I’ve forgotten this b...
STEVEN WRIGHT

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate...
STEVEN SINOFSKY

Back then it was nothing like today. So you'd go to the bowling alley. We bowled and you could b...
STEVEN TYLER

When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul All...
STEVEN PINKER

The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of m...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

The amateur tweets. The pro works.
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

Turning pro is a mindset. If we are struggling with fear, self-sabotage, procrastination, self-doubt...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD

George is a radio announcer, and when he walks under a bridge... you can't hear him talk.
STEVEN WRIGHT

One kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past, to make the world anew in each new wor...
STEVEN STUCKY

Anime has been good to me. I made and continue to make very little money at it, but the undying, fev...
STEVEN BLUM

Anime has sent me all over the world, introducing me to people who have touched my life in indescrib...
STEVEN BLUM

The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing.
STEVEN WRIGHT

I grew up in New York, in the Village, and I started going to Stella Adler pretty young. I was 13 or...
STEVEN STRAIT

I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of vi...
STEVEN SPIELBERG

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The ...
STEVEN PINKER

I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the ...
STEVEN CHU

One of the reasons why people - particularly young people - love action movies is because what they ...
STEVEN SEAGAL

Action films are great, but an action film that has characters that are compelling and a story that ...
STEVEN SEAGAL

If God dropped acid, would he see people?
STEVEN WRIGHT

If only Coca-Cola had had the kind of message to accompany its addictive deliciousness that Fox News...
STEVEN WEBER

I acknowledge that Hulu's easy accessibility probably keeps some people from pirating. But a res...
STEVEN LEVITAN

I hooked up my accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop,...
STEVEN WRIGHT

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced ...
STEVEN CHU

I'm used to seeing it, but it's weird having an Academy Award. You usually only see one of t...
STEVEN WRIGHT

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,...
STEVEN PINKER

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oa...
STEVEN PINKER

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral ...
STEVEN WRIGHT

Anyone who thinks they stand apart from society and defies all which govern its existence has less i...
STEVEN WEBER

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

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Steven Johnson

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

Steven Johnson

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