Some Fascinating
Quotes
"The information superhighway is a dirt road
that won't be paved over until 2025."
-- Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom/Blockbuster.
"Who the hell wants to hear actors
talk?" --H.M. Warner, Warner
Brothers, 1927
"This telephone has too many shortcomings to be
seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of
no value to us." -- An internal
"I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers." -- IBM chairman Thomas
Watson, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would
want a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, founder, chairman & president of
DEC, 1977
"640k ought to be enough for
anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981 (Did he mean $640K?)
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than
1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march
of science, 1949
"Everything that can be invented has already
been invented."
-- Charles H. Duell,
director of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if
Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
- Kristin Wilson, Nintendo, Inc., 1989.
"A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's
atmosphere." --The New York Times,
1936
"The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is
English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new
letters like N and T." --Scott
McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this
country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data
processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice
Hall, 1957
"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division
of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable
commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in
particular?" --David
Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for
investment in the radio in the 1920s.
"The world is coming to an end in 1950."
--Historian Henry Adams, 1903
"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the
power of the atom."
--Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken, 1923
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done
the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do
this." --Spencer
Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It"
Notepads.
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got
this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think
about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our
salary, we'll
come
work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to
Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got
through college yet.'"
--Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts
to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.
"Professor Goddard does not know the relation
between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily
in high schools."
--1921 New York Times editorial about Robert
Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.
"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle
development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of
life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable
condition
of weight training."
--Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the
"unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.
"Television won't last because
people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
--Producer Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946
"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground
to try and find oil? You're crazy!"
--Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his
project to drill for oil in 1859
"Well-informed people know it is impossible to
transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing
would be of no practical value."
--
"Stocks have reached what looks like a
permanently high plateau."
--Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics,
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no
military value."
--Marechal Ferdinand Foch,
Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure
de Guerre.
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous
fiction." --Pierre Pachet, Professor of
Physiology at
"If excessive smoking actually plays a role in
the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one."
--W.C. Heuper, National
Cancer Institute, 1954
"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will
forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon."
--Sir John Eric Ericksen,
British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen
"By 2000, politics will simply fade
away. We will not see any political parties."
--Visionary and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, 1966
"You ain't going
nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck."
--The Grand Ole Opry's Jim
Denny to Elvis Presley, 1954
"Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty
of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive."
--The winning entry in a "What were HAL's first words" contest judged by 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY creator Arthur C. Clarke
"[Andy] Grove giveth
and [Bill] Gates taketh away."
--Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of
hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but
in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." --A Yale University management
professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable
overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
"That rainbow song's no good. Take it
out." - MGM memo after first
showing of The Wizard Of Oz
"You'd better learn secretarial skills or else
get married." - Modeling agency,
rejecting Marilyn Monroe in 1944
"Radio has no future." "X-rays are
clearly a hoax". "The aeroplane is
scientifically impossible."
- Royal Society president Lord Kelvin, 1897-9.
"Forget it. No Civil War picture ever made a
nickel."
- MGM executive, advising against investing in Gone With The Wind
"Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald.
Can dance a little." - A film company's verdict
on Fred Astaire's 1928 screen test
"The atom bomb will never go off -
and I speak as an expert in explosives." -
"Television won't matter in your lifetime or
mine." - Radio Times editor Rex
Lambert, 1936
"And for the tourist who really wants to get
away from it all, safaris in
- Newsweek magazine, predicting popular holidays for
the late 1960s