"My father was black, my grandfather a monkey. So it seems that my family started where yours stopped." -- Alexander Dumas
"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." -- Dr. Who
"I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; and I would remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." -- Barry Goldwater
"Asimov's 3 Laws of Alien Behavior: 1) Their survival will be more important than our survival. 2) Wimps don't become top dogs. 3) They will assume that the first two laws apply to us." -- Isaac Asimov
"And say not thou 'My country right or wrong,' Nor shed thy blood for an unhallowed cause." -- John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Congress, Slavery and an Unjust War, c. 1847
"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.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." -- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
"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 Victoria, 1873.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981
"640k is enough for most users. Windows, on the other hand..." - DJ Delorie, Linux Expo 1999.
"The video begins. 'Hello,' chirps an effervescent young Microsoft employee. 'This is a demonstration of the Caldera OpenLinux operating system.' Caldera is a small company that, in a delicious irony, is currently suing Microsoft on antitrust grounds. The young Microsoftie continues: 'The demonstration will show that Caldera's operating system provides effective functionality for end users.'
Effective functionality? What an understatement that turns out to be! In the next few minutes we see how OpenLinux has a 'graphical user interface' -- just like Windows! It has a built-in browser -- just like Windows! It runs word processing and other key applications--just like Windows! In fact, says our host, sounding more and more like the guy who sells Veg-o-matics on late-night TV, 'the Caldera operating system is ... powerful and easy to use.'
When several reporters guffaw, three Microsoft people glare at the press section. But we can't help it; listening to a Microsoft employee tout a competitor is funny. 'Caldera could do an ad campaign around this,' whispers one reporter. 'Just think of the punch line: 'Powerful and easy to use' -- Microsoft." From the Microsoft Diary: 'Witnesses in Wonderland' On trial in Washington -- Joseph Nocera
"During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?" -- P.J. O'Rourke
"Note: I would like to apologize in advance for the exceedingly bitter and hostile tone of this rant, but I won't. The ability to reason is what separates humanity from the other animals, and my contempt for those who willingly discard it is finite but unbounded." -- unk, from deja.com
"The Department of Redundancy Department: Their charter: To eliminate and eradicate superfluous redundancies" -- Kathleen M. Fischer
"If your franchise is not secured by force of personal arms, you are a subject, not a citizen." -- H. Beam Piper
"Adolescence is a surreal world: kids who don helmets and practice banging into one another for hours each week are deemed healthy and wholesome, even heroic. Geeks are branded strange and anti-social for building and participating in one of the world's truly revolutionary new cultures - the Internet and the World Wide Web." -- Jon Katz
"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin, Oct 7 1789
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." --Bertrand Russell
"Idiots have always been exploited, and this is only right. The day they cease to be, they will triumph, and the world will be lost." -- Alfred Capus, c. late 19th cent.
"Middle age hasn't affected me. I still enjoy going to a happening place and staying there until they turn out the lights and I'm the only one left. Last night, it was Costco." -- Glenn Brooks
"The year 1935 will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future." -- Adolf Hitler
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Postscript to Revolt in 2100
"Stress at work can cause a number of medical problems including: headaches; sleep disturbance; difficulty in concentrating; short temper; upset stomach; and job dissatisfaction." -- CNN, 12-Mar-99
"Linux is a very complete and sophisticated operating system. There are and will be large numbers of applications available for it." -- Paul Maritz, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms and applications in court testamony.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." -- Elbert Hubbard
"A country where there are more lawyers than engineers (and perhaps relatedly, more prison inmates than students) cannot expect to have a technological future." -- Prof Martin Vermeer
"Movie: 'The Wizard of Oz' - Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again." -- Actual listing in the TV section of the Marin (CA) Independent-Journal
"America: The only country where a significant portion of the population believes that Professional Wrestling is real but the Moon Landing was faked." -- Eric B. Smith, from his .signature
"But critics -- not least among them large software vendors such as Microsoft -- portray the freeware community as a semi-organized rabble of hobbyists, and question whether such a group can be trusted to act as caretakers for software used to run mission- critical applications...I would turn the question around, and ask, 'If it's a hobby for us and a job for you, then why are you doing such a shoddy job?'" -- Linus Torvalds
"Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed." -- unk
"Nobody but a lawyer can tell legal from illegal, and the lawyers can't tell right from wrong." - Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?" -- Dick Cavett mocking the TV-violence debate
"Windows 95: n. 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition." -- Rich Grise
"He would hold a grudge until it died of old age - then he'd have it stuffed and mounted..." - unk
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Unix is user friendly - it's just a bit more choosy about who it's friends are." -- Gene Buckle
"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another." -- Lysander Spooner, 1875 "Let us cease confusing the two." -- me, 1997
"England, whose government, for a thousand years and more, has been little or nothing else than a band of robbers, who have conspired to monopolize the land, and, as far as possible, all other wealth. These conspirators, calling themselves kings, nobles, and freeholders, have, by force and fraud, taken to themselves all civil and military power; they keep themselves in power solely by force and fraud, and the corrupt use of their wealth; and they employ their power solely in robbing and enslaving the great body of their own people, and in plundering and enslaving other peoples. And the world has been, and now is, full of examples substantially similar. And the governments of our own country do not differ so widely from others, in this respect, as some of us imagine." -- Lysander Spooner, 1875
"If at first you don't succeed - don't take up skydiving."
"If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?" -- unk
"Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!" -- Groucho Marx
"I made a killing on Wall Street a few years ago...I shot my broker." -- Groucho Marx
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx
"Proudly perched on the tailgate of the dumptruck of technology, waiting to be bounced off at the next budgetary pothole." -- MWH
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible." -- Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide people into kinds, and those who don't. I am of the latter..." -- unk.
"The attempt to justify an evil deed has perhaps more pernicious consequences than the evil deed itself. The justification of a past crime is the planting and cultivation of future crimes." -- Eric Hoffer
"We must be patient, if for no other reason than this: They have all the guns." -- Orson Scott Card, "Speaker for the Dead"
"Go not unto the Usenet for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (and quite a few things that just have nothing at all to do with the question)." -- unknown
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Pascal
"Linux was made by foreign terrorists to take money from true US companies like Microsoft." -Some AOL'er. "To this end we dedicate ourselves..." -Don (From the .sig of "Don" )
"After all, how do you give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when you know that if you throw it into a room with the truth, you'd risk a matter/anti-matter explosion." (N. Petreley: "Down to the Wire", 96 SEP Infoworld)
"... being a Linux user is sort of like living in a house inhabited by a large family of carpenters and architects. Every morning when you wake up, the house is a little different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved. Or perhaps someone has temporarily removed the floor under your bed." -- Unix for Dummies, Jon "maddog" Hall
"Too many textbooks and discussions leave students free to make up their minds about things." - Mel Gabler, a Texas text- book critic, citing a severe "problem" in the state's choices of educational materials.
"There are three types of voters. The ones who agree with you, the ones who don't, and the ones who don't care about your issue. But you can't vote that way, so people vote only on the issue of the day. You aren't the issue of the day anymore. The pendulum swung, you lost control over the gun and now they are shooting you with it. Someday the pendulum will swing back and you can shoot them some more, but it won't last, for soon the pendulum will swing again, and they'll be shooting you again. That's all gov't is, that is all it can ever accomplish. No matter what the issue, no matter what the direction, you can push the gov't just so far before people who've been hurt will push back the same way, and there is gov't, eternally in the middle of mighty struggles, moving back and forth by inches, accomplishing nothing and using up an ungodly amount of money in the effort. Welcome to this thing called "politics"." - me
"Never worry about the bullet with your name on it. Instead, worry about shrapnel addressed to 'occupant.'" -- Murphy
"Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?" -- Michael James
"The Welsh pray on their knees. And on their neighbors. The Scots keep the Sabbath. And anything else they can get their hands on. The Irish? The Irish are looking for a cause to die for. And the English are a self made race. Thus relieving God of a great responsibility." -- Terry Austin
"There is no more subtle means of transforming the basic concepts of our government, or shifting from the preeminence of individual rights, to the preeminence of government wishes, than is afforded by redefinition of 'general welfare', as that term is used to define the Government's power of seizures... In essence the claim is that if slums exist the Government may seize, redevelop & sell all the property in any area it may select as appropriate, so long as the area includes the slum area. This amounts to a claim on the part of the authorities for unreviewable power to seize & sell whole sections of the city." --- DC District Court 1953
"The right of property is the guardian of every other right, & to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty." --- Arthur Lee 1775 (quoted in H.L.Mencken Prejudices pg 221)
"[If] the SSN is to be stopped from becoming a de facto Standard Universal Identifier, the individual must have the option not to disclose his number..." --- Privacy Act, S-93-1183 1974 US Code Congressional & Administrative News 1974 pg 6945 (quoted by Zobel 1980-05-19 in Doe v Sharp 491 FS 346 @349)
"We are not unaware of the threat to privacy implicit in the accumulation of vast amounts of personal information in computerized data banks or other massive gov't files. The collection of taxes, the distribution of welfare & social security benefits, the direction of our Armed Forces, & the enforcement of all criminal laws all require the orderly preservation of great quantities of information, much of which is personal in character & potentially embarrassing or harmful if disclosed. The right to collect & use such data is typically accompanied by a concomitant statutory or regulatory duty to avoid unwarranted disclosures." --- Hamilton 1993-03-22 in Greidinger v Davis 988 F2d 1344 @1353 (quoting Whalen v Roe 429 US 389, 97 SCt 869, 51 LEd2d 64)
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." -- Gene Spafford ( spaf@cs.purdue.edu ), 1992
"You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system." -- Steve Jobs, Wired Mag., Feb. 96
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". -- Robert A. Heinlein, 'Time Enough for Love'
"If Governor Fields is right, I am going to stand by him because he is right. If he is wrong, I am going to stand by him because he is a Democrat." -- Senator Augustus Owsley Stanley (D-Kentucky)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
"Geeks are to be found everywhere there are media being created, new or old. They are the techs, nerds, brains, and producers behind mainstream media. They might be underground, but they are a cohesive and tightly knit band. They share a common value system. They take care of one another. Anchors, phobic pundits, lost boomer intellectuals, displaced academics, Washington gasbags and attack-panelists, NPR announcers worried about high culture, beware. One day, when the secret command is given, they will rise up and take control of all the machines, driving the wise men and women, the luddites, and the mediaphobes from their media temples. It won't be pretty." -- Jon Katz "But it will be fun." -- Me
"So I went to the psychologist and he says, 'Emo, what does this inkblot look like to you?' I said, 'Well, it's kind of embarassing.' He said, 'Emo, everyone sees something silly. Don't be embarassed. Tell me, what does this inkblot look like to you?' I said, 'Well, uh, to me, um, it looks like, uh, standard pattern number three in the Rorshach series to test obsessive compulsiveness.' And he got kind of depressed, so I said, 'OK, it's a butterfly.'" -- Emo Phillips
"Well, what do you think [laws] are for? We want them to be broken. There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. [...] just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers ... that's the game." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged p. 411
While lifting a ~170 lb. Sun disk drive: Henry: Let's just say I'm trying to be macho. Eric: No, I'd say it was a case of testosterone poisoning.
"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger" -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Congress shall make no law restricting the size of integers that may be multiplied together, or the number of times that an integer may be multiplied by itself, or the modulus by which an integer may be reduced." -- Eric Norman
"...the First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, since governments never try to ban the other kind." -- Mike Godwin
"To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson, on the virtues of "colorblindness" in modern society.
"His ... argument style makes me want to step outside and hork in the bushes." -- Robert Hettinga
"Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too." -- D. J. Hicks
"God is real... unless declared integer." -- unk, but obviously a Fortran programmer...
"What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary." -- Richard Harkness, i New York Times]
"A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother." -- unk
"The Cat's Diary: Day 751: My captors continue to torment me with bizarre dangling objects. They eat lavish meals in my presence while I am forced to subsist on dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of eventual escape -- that, and the satisfaction I get from occasionally ruining some piece of their furniture.
Day 891: I fear I may be going insane. Yesterday, I ate a houseplant. Tomorrow I may eat another." -- unk
"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot." -- unk
"Statistics are used as a drunk uses lampposts -- for support, not illumination." -- anonymous
"Crazy? Some people think walking down the street muttering to yourself is crazy. I'll tell you what crazy is. Crazy is walking down the street with half a cantalope on your head, saying 'I'm a hamster, I'm a hamster!'" -- Agent WD-40, in Spy Hard
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. -- George F. Will
From rec.arts.sf.written, in a thread entitled "What is AOL?": "[It is] An organization set up to give Internetters someone to make ethnic jokes about. -- Arthur D. Hlavaty hlavaty@panix.com
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey." -- John Ruskin
"And, ironically, that's how the founding fathers expected it to work: either the government stays clean, or the people shoot them." -- ttk
He who speaks the truth must have one foot in the stirrup. -- Armenian proverb
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified, bug- ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
"The Observer betrayed a lack of understanding of the Internet - how it works and how impossible, even self-defeating, any form of regulation might be. ... This is much more complex than we indicated" -- British newspaper "The Observer," leading article 1-Sep-96, backtracking on its call for the Internet to be censored
Windows 95: Proof that you can be 10 years late and still get most of the credit. -- Romulo Romero
Parents complain that "kids don't do anything for themselves anymore." Then they write letters to the board demanding that the schools do something about it. -- Arnold Lapiner
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H. L. Mencken.
"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." -- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law"
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. -- Dorothy Parker
Old Basic programmers never die...they just GOSUB without RETURN...
I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers. -- A Bit of Fry and Laurie
The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": 1. fighting; 2. fleeing; 3. feeding; and 4. mating. -- Psychology professor in neuropsychology intro course
With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. -- Ransom K. Ferm
Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
The graduate with a Science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "What will it cost?" The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks, "You want fries with that?"
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants. -- A. Whitney Brown
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.
Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps. -- Emo Phillips
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See"
Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy
Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease". Disraeli replied, "That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit. -- In the August 1993 issue, page 9, of PS magazine, the Army's magazine of preventive maintenance
G: "If we do happen to step on a mine, Sir, what do we do?" EB: "Normal procedure, Lieutenant, is to jump 200 feet in the air and scatter oneself over a wide area." -- Somewhere in No Man's Land, BA4
Sacred cows make the best hamburger. -- Mark Twain
"Time's fun when you're having flies." -- Kermit the Frog
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night." -- Charlie Brown, Peanuts [Charles Schulz]
When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. "It is always so," my mother said. "You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone." ... Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone. -- Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope"
George Foreman, when asked whether he worries about brain damage: "Anybody going into boxing already has brain damage."
Tommy Lasorda, on former Los Angeles Dodger catcher Mike Scioscia: "If he raced his pregnant wife, he'd finish third."
Comic Robin Williams after watching his first hockey game between Vancouver and San Jose: "It's so quick and so brutal and I'm just in shock. I'm amazed that people don't keep screaming: `911!'"
LPGA player Elaine Johnson, after her shot hit a tree and rebounded into her bra: "I'll take a two-shot penalty, but I'll be damned if I'm going play the ball where it lies."
Society without organized religion is like a crazed psychopath without a loaded .45.
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
"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." -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"But what the hell is it good for?" -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
"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.
"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 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 Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.
"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." -- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind."
"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make." -- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
"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 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.
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