Famous people Slips

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

Radio has no future.
Lord Kelvin, Victorian physicist and President of the Royal Society, c. 1897.

Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an impossibility--a development which we should waste little time dreaming about.
Lee de Forest, 1926, inventor of the cathode ray tube.

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates, 1981.

We don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.
Hewlett-Packard's rejection of Steve Jobs, who went on to found Apple Computers.

Airplanes are interesting toys, but they have no military value.
Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1911.

With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.
Business Week, 1958.

People can have the Model T in any color...so long as it's black.
Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. The company was forced to move with the times, introducing a choice of colors in 1925.

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.

I get to go to a lot of famous places, like Canada.
Britney Spears, on the good parts of being famous.

If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed.
Prince Philip, husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, to British students in China during a 1986 state visit.

It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister.
Margaret Thatcher, 1974.