Never answer an anonymous letter.
Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Ursula K. LeGuin
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to
walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
Phyllis Diller
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Samuel Butler
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the
universe.
Carl Sagan
People used to explore the dimensions of reality by taking LSD to make the
world look weird.
Now the world is weird and they take Prozac to make it look normal.
Bangstrom
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of
nothing.
Redd Foxx
Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead
of using it.
Gordon R. Dickson
One of the lessons of history is that Nothing is often a good thing to do
and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting
a falsehood, isn't it?
Anonymous
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Carl Gustav Jung
| If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to
your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling
you how to do , then YOU DESERVE IT.
I never set out to be weird. It was always the other people who called
me weird.
Frank Zappa
|
If a person wants to be atheistic, it's his God-given right to be an atheist.
Michael Patton
If you don't want to work, you have to work to earn enough money so that
you won't have to work.
Ogden Nash
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
Sir Karl Raymund Popper
Isn't it strange? The same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take
economists seriously.
Cincinnati Enquirer
HISTORIC BLUNDERS
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 about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women
to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism and become lesbians.
Pat Robertson, speaking of the Equal Rights Amendment Mar. 22, 1930
The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this
century's history. 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 woman want?"
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, and I 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 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.'
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
640K 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 in 1859.
The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than
a 'C,' the idea must 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 Express Corp.)
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Attributed to Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
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 carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
James Clerk Maxwell, 1871
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all
been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility
of their ever being suplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly
remote ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of
decimals.
Albert A. Michelson, 1894
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.
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
with the 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 only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and
the earth . . . revolves with great speed 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 Holy Scripture false. Nor can
one answer that this is not a matter of faith, since if it is not a matter
of faith "as regards the topic," it is a matter of faith "as regards the speaker";
and so 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 Holy Spirit 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 a message sent to nobody in particular?
Anonymous associates of David Sarnoff's in response to his urgings for
investment in the radio in the 1920s.
Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
Irving Fisher, 1929
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
H. M. Warner, founder of Warner Brothers film studios, 1927
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
Lord Kelvin, 1895
Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if
not utterly impossible.
Simon Newcomb , 1902, eighteen months before Kitty Hawk
Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.
