- Marshall Ferdinand Foch 1911
"It is unlikely that man will ever harness the power of the atom."
- Robert Millikan, Nobel laureate, physics 1923
"They will never be able to detonate a nuclear bomb - and I speak as an explosives expert."
- Admiral William Leahy, 1945
"Can't play. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance some."
- What a movie company thought about Fred Astaire's test shoot in 1928
"You should go back to driving a truck."
- Said by a consert director after he fired Elvis Presley in 1954
"I think that there is a world market for perhaps five computers."
- Thomas J. Watson Sr., founder of IBM
When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, there wasn't much interest in it apparently. After having tried it, one of the presidents of the company, Rutherford Hayes, said:
"It is a marvellous invention, but who would ever have to use one of these?"
"640 KB will be enough for anyone."
- Bill Gates, 1981
"The Internet is just a hype. I don't think that people in the long run will want to spend as much time as it really takes to surf the Net."
- Ines Uusman, Swedish Minister for Communication, May 12, 1996.
Disclaimer: The quotes listed here are translated from Swedish, usually back to English. This is due to me being lazy and not wanting to find the originl quotes. Any discrepancies between this version and the original one are too bad. I also take no responsibility for the correctness of these quotes.
"Bush gave an interview and he said people will vote for him because 'They've seen me weep, they´ve seen me laugh, and they´ve seen me hug.' These are the same qualifications for a Tickle Me Elmo."
- Bill Maher
"Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the civil servant - it doesn't work and it can't be fired."
- Walter Walker, quoted in Newspapers, 1981
"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones."
- Albert Einstein
[On his running for California Governor]
"It's the most important decision I've had to make since 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."
- Harry S. Truman (circa 1962)
"Today is 'Take our Daughters to Work Day.' This is when girls ages Nine to Fifteen go to work. Or, as it's called at the Nike factory - Thursday."
- Bill Maher
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."
- Peter O'Toole
"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."
- Groucho Marx
"When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep -- not screaming, like the passengers in his car."
- Unknown
"Fame has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddy pool."
- Bill Maher
"Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings."
"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 magills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
"Failure is not an option -- it comes bundled with Windows."
"Microsoft: 'You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips.' "
"Sexy Unix Commands: date; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime;"
"Marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering."
"USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population."
- David Letterman
"Americans have different ways of saying things. They say "elevator", we say "lift" ... they say "President", we say "stupid psychopathic git."
- Alexai Sayle
"The Internet is a gateway to get on the net."
- Bob Dole
"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
- Dan Quayle
"It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago."
- Dan Quayle
"Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts."
- Dan Quayle
"We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world."
- Dan Quayle
"We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a 'part' of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a 'part' of Europe."
- Dan Quayle
"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."
- Dan Quayle
"Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children."
- Dan Quayle
"I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."
- Dan Quayle
"I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix."
- Dan Quayle
"For NASA, space is still a high priority."
- Dan Quayle
"A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls."
- George W. Bush
"What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think, vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position."
- George W. Bush
"If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign."
- George W. Bush
"The most important job is not to be Governor, or First Lady in my case."
- George W. Bush
"An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened, Atlee got out"
- Winston Churchill, On Clement Atlee
"I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived"
- Winston Churchill, On Stanley Baldwin
"He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened"
- Winston Churchill, On Stanley Baldwin
Woman: "I can smell alcohol on his breath!"
Hancock: "I've been drinking, bitch!"
"At every crisis the Kaiser crumpled. In defeat he fled; in revolution he abdicated; in exile he remarried."
- Winston Churchill
"When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal." (Change President to Kaiser and it's true
)- Richard Nixon
"Any political party that includes the word 'democratic' in its name, isn't."
- Patrick Murray
"The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people."
- James Rado
"The main difference for the history of the world if I had been shot rather than Kennedy is that Onassis probably wouldn't have married Mrs Khrushchev."
- Nikita Khrushchev
"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."
- Stephen King
"When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me."
- Emo Philips
"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
- Quentin Crisp
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The Shrine of Terry Pratchett awsomeness
"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life."
"That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: 'I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?' An American says: 'I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?' "
"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
- Good Omens
"In the begining there was nothing, and it exploded."
- On the Big Bang Theory
"For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks."
- Equal Rites
"The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking."
- Eric
"An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."
- Hogfather
"It could not be happening because this sort of thing did not happen. Any contradictory evidence could be safely ignored."
- Jingo
"Sham Harga had run a succesful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits."
- Men at Arms
"[The pamphlet] was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners."
- Monstruous Regiment
"Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think."
- Small Gods
"He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at."
- Small Gods
"Only one creature could have duplicated the expressions on their faces, and that would be a pigeon who has heard not only that Lord Nelson has got down off his column but has also been seen buying a 12-bore repeater and a box of cartridges."
- Mort
- "Pardon me for living, I'm sure."
- NO-ONE GETS PARDONED FOR LIVING.
- Mort
"The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed."
- Mort
"Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
- Mort
- "Sodomy non sapiens," said Albert under his breath.
- "What does that mean?"
- "Means I'm buggered if I know."
- Mort
"FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC." [Think about it...]
- Motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, Guards! Guards!
"It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing."
- Captain Vimes, Guards! Guards!
"Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So fresh the pig h'an't noticed they're gone!"
- Moving Pictures
His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink."
- Dydactylos, Small Gods
"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god)."
- Small Gods
"That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does A Falling Tree in the Forest Make A Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles."
- Small Gods
"I know she's in there," said Verence, holding his crown in his hands in the famous Ai-Senor-Mexican-Bandits-Have-Raided-Our-Village position.
- Lords and Ladies
Slab: Jus' say "AarrghaarrghpleeassennononoUGH"
- Detritus' war on drugs, Feet of Clay
"Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk [...]"
- Feet of Clay
"Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs."
- Susan, Hogfather
"It's a sad and terrible thing that high-born folk really have thought that the servants would be totally fooled if spirits were put into decanters that were cunningly labelled backwards. And also throughout history the more politically conscious butler has taken it on trust, and with rather more justification, that his employers will not notice if the whisky is topped up with eniru."
- Hogfather
"My curvy sword at your neck, you unclean son of a dog of the female persuasion!"
- Klatchian, Jingo
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