High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
Which is it: Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound.Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book,and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching."
Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BCE
This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
Western Union internal memo, 1876
It is only righteous that Joshua Coppersmiths, who has tried to find investors to financethe development of a so-called telephone, is arrested for fraud!
Article in the Boston Post (1865)
Radio is just a fashion contrivance that will soon die out. It is obvious that there never will be invented a proper receiver!
Thomas Edison
I do not believe there is the slightest chance of war with Japan in our lifetime. TheJapanese are our allies.... Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our vital security in any way.... War with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonablegovernment need take into account.
Winston Churchill
We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.
Decca Records Rejecting the Beatles, in 1962
Finland must not be allowed to disappear off the map.
Neville Chamberlain
And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I havesaid before, but I shall say it again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreignwars.
President Roosevelt
The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century'shistory. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.
Senator Dan Quayle, Sept. 15, 1988
The great question - which I have not been able to answer - is, "What does a womanwant?"
Sigmund Freud
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943
I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, andI can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year.
Prentice Hall, editor in charge of business books, 1957
But what ... is it good for?
Anonymous engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968,commenting on the microchip.
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 wantto do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, `No.' So then we went toHewlett-Packard, and they said, `Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through collegeyet.'
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer Inc. on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his personal computer
.There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
Ken Olson , President, Chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
640Kb ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates, 1981
Natura non facit saltum. (Nature does not make leaps.)
Anonymous ancient motto frequently cited by Carolus Linnaeus
Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy.
Anonymous drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in1859.
The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the ideamust be feasible.
Anonymous Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal ExpressCorp.)
In a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated,and ... the only occupation which will then be left to the men of science will be to carrythese measurements to another place of decimals.
James Clerk Maxwell, 1871
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all beendiscovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever beingsuplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote ... Our futurediscoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
Albert A. Michelson, 1894
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Attributed to Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the needto have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
New York Times, in editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work, 1921
Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.
Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
The good Christian should beware the mathematican and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicans have made a covenant withthe devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.
Saint Augustine
First, . . . to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and onlyturns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth . . . revolves with greatspeed around the sun . . .is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering HolyScripture false. Nor can one answer that this is not a matter of faith, since if it is not amatter of faith "as regards the topic," it is a matter of faith "as regards the speaker"; andso it would be heretical to say that Abraham did not have two children and Jacob twelve,as well as to say that Christ was not born of a virgin, because both are said by the HolySpirit through the mouth of the prophets and the apostles.
Cardinal Bellarmine, in a Letter to Foscarinin, April 12, 1615
The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for amessage sent to nobody in particular?
Anonymous associates of David Sarnoff's in response to his urgings for investment in theradio in the 1920s.
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
H. M. Warner, founder of Warner Brothers film studios, 1927 Lord Kelvin
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of the
Add a Comment