Quotations
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  • "Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet", Douglas Adams
     
  • "A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn't", Douglas Adams
     
  • "Sacred cows make the best hamburger", Mark Twain
     
  • "I suspect that a lot of the stress we see around us arises from the cognitive dissonance set up by one side of the brain hearing very plausible spin while the other side knows it just ain't so...", David Palmer
     
  • "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can somehow become great", Mark Twain
     
  • "Propose to any Englishman any principle or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible; if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless because it will not slice a pineapple. Impart the same principle or show the same machine to an American or to one of our Colonists and you will observe that the whole effort of his mind is to find some new application of the principle, some new use for the instrument." Charles Babbage
     
  • "Work spares us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need", Voltaire
     
  • "The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back", Abigail Van Buren
     
  • "I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence", Steve Jobs, 2000
     
  • "Ideas are to Humans what pearls are to oysters - their principal source of value!" Michael Martin-Smith, 1999)
     
  • "Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
     
  • "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate
    Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure
    It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us
    We ask ourselves: Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and, fabulous?
    Actually who are you not to be?
    You are a child of light. Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
    There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
    We are born to manifest the glory of all that is within us.
    It's not just in some of us: It is in everyone.
    And as we let our light shine,
    We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same
    As we are liberated from our fear
    Our presence automatically liberates others."
    Marianne Williamson, 1992
     
  • "Someone ought to tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now.", Michael Landon
     
  • "I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.", Henry Ford
     
  • "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind," Winston Churchill
     
  • "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams," Eleanor Roosevelt
     
  • "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance", Derek Bok
     
  • "You cannot leap a chasm in two bounds", Old Chinese Proverb
     
  • "It is the cracked ones that let in the light", Old Chinese Proverb
     
  • "The question that faces the strategic decision maker is not what his organisation should do tomorrow. It is, what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow?", Peter Drucker
     
  • "If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?", Stephen Levine
     
  • "Stress kills, pleasure heals", Herbert Selmer
     
  • "The most precious real estate is becoming my trouser belt space", David Farber 1997
     
  • "If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
     
  • "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943)
     
  • "The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most." (IBM to the founders of Xerox, 1959)
     
  • "I have travelled 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, on the microchip)
     
  • "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home". (Kenneth Olsen, president 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)
     
  • "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895)
     
  • "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.)
     
  • "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)
     
  • "640K ought to be enough for anybody." (Bill Gates, 1981)
     
  • "There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, then to initiate a new order of things." (Nicholo Machiavelli)
     
  • "Where there is no vision, the people perish." (Proverbs 29.18)
     
  • "No youngster today should dream of becoming a corporate vice president by the time he is 50. By the time he is 50 corporate bureaucracies will no longer exist." (Norman McRae in the Economist)
     
  • "Make every decision as low as possible in the organisation. The charge of the Light Brigade was ordered by an officer who was not looking at the territory." (Robert Townsend, former CEO, Avis)
     
  • "We have a layer of clay that prevents anything either way - up or down. The layer is middle management." (Ciba chief operating officer Heini Lippuner)
     
  • "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." (Walt Disney)
     
  • "Old people are dangerous, they have no fear of the future." (anon)
     
  • "One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." (anon)
     
  • "Ideas are like rabbits - you get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." (anon)
     
  • "There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe." (anon)
     
  • "A man must rise above the earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will he fully understand the world in which he lives." (Socrates circa 399BC)
     
  • "Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information" (T.S.Eliot)
     
  • "10% of all web searches are sex related" (Kevin Kelly)
     
  • "I must confess that my imagination ... refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea". (H G Wells, British novelist, 1901)
     
  • "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value". (Marshal Ferdinand Foch, French military strategist and future World War I commander, 1911)
     
  • "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad". (A president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Horace Rackham (Henry Ford's lawyer) not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903. Rackham ignored the advice, bought $5,000 worth of stock and sold it several years later for $12.5 million)
     
  • "Believe me, Germany is unable to wage war". (Former British prime minister David Lloyd George, Aug. 1, 1934)
     
  • "Nobody now fears that a Japanese fleet could deal an unexpected blow on our Pacific possessions ... Radio makes surprise impossible". (Josephus Daniels, former US secretary of the navy, Oct. 16, 1922)
     
  • "Computers in the future may ... perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons". (Popular Mechanics, forecasting the development of computer technology, 1949)
     
  • "We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out". (Decca Records rejecting the Beatles, 1962)
     
  • "Although television is theoretically feasible , it's a waste of time both Commercially and financially ...." (1926"
     
  • "(F)or the majority of people, the use of tobacco has a beneficial effect". (Dr Ian G MacDonald, Los Angeles surgeon, quoted in Newsweek, Nov. 18, 1963)
     
  • "We are here to do.
    And through doing to learn;
    and through learning to know;
    and through knowing to experience wonder;
    and through wonder to attain wisdom;
    and through wisdom to find simplicity;
    and through simplicity to give attention;
    and through attention
    to see what needs to be done..."
    (Pirke Avot)
     
  • "Restlessness and discontent are the necessities of progress." (Thomas A. Edison)
     
  • "An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility" (Jan Carlson)
     
  • "The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives." (Albert Einstein)
     
  • "Perhaps the best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time." (Dean Acheson)
     
  • "We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities." (Pogo)
     
  • "Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time." (Alvin Toffler)
     
  • "What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want." (Mignon McLaughlin)
     
  • "The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present." (Eileen Shanahan.)
     
  • "Men who never get carried away should be." (Malcolm Forbes)
     
  • "Unhappiness is best described as the difference between our talents and our expectations." (Edward de Bono)
     
  • "Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing" (Wang Yang-Ming 1498)
     
  • " Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity." (Albert Einstein)