Business Quotes

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We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

-- Petronius Arbiter 210 B.C.

 

Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory.

-- Warren Buffett on how the academic community

regards his investment approach.

 

Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are busy

doing it.

-- Chinese proverb

 

May you live in interesting times.

-- Chinese curse

 

I'm a peripheral visionary.

-- Steven Wright

 

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

-- JPopular 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 bus'n books for Prentice Hall,

1957

 

But what ... 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.

-- J 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.

 

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 HP interested in his and

Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

 

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.

 

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?

You're crazy.

-- Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his

project to drill for oil in 1859.

 

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

-- Irving Fisher, Prof. of Economics, Yale University,

1929.

 

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, CEO of Microsoft, 1981

 

I want to make sure everybody who has a job wants a job

-- George Bush, during his first Presidential campaign

 

A hotel is a place that keeps manufacturers of 25-watt bulbs in

business.

-- Shelley Berman

 

- No job is so simple that it can't be done wrong.

 

- You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.

 

- Only adults have difficulty with childproof bottles.

 

Never wear a backward baseball cap to an interview unless applying for

the job of umpire.

-- Dan Zevin

 

Never take a job where winter winds can blow up your pants.

-- Geraldo Rivera

 

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

 

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

 

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

 

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

 

He who hesitates is probably right.

 

No one is listening until you make a mistake.

 

Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.

 

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is

research.

 

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.

 

My model is correct. Do not be fooled by your observations.

-- dr. Phil B. Smith, Professor of Nuclear Physics, State

University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

 

Many of the requirements of graduate education ...are "dragons."

Dragons have no purpose except to be slain; that is, they are tests of

motivation to prove how difficult it is to get knighthood (or the

valuable doctorate) and, therefore, how valuable those people must be

who already have it (the faculty).

-- Mills (1953) cited by Karon, 1995 in "Becoming a

First-Rate Professional Psychologist Despite Graduate

Education."

 

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an

election.

-- Otto von Bismarck (1815-98)

 

Frankly, I don't believe people think of their office as a workplace anyway. I think they think of it as a stationery store with Danish. You want to get your pastry, your envelopes, your supplies, your toilet paper, six cups of coffee, and go home.

-- Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage, Bantam Books (1993)

 

If we knew what it was we were doing it would not be called research, would it?

-- Alfred Einstein

 

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

-- John Andrew Holme

 

Every time you turn on your new car, you're turning on 20

microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you're using a

computer. Every time I use a settop box or game machine, I'm using a

computer. The only computer you don't know how to work is your

Microsoft computer, right?

-- Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc., from

an April 1997 interview in Upside Magazine

 

I can only pray that your personal magnetism won't erase my hard

drive.

-- Alice to Wally in the comic strip "Dilbert" 11/20/96

 

He who talks by the YARD and works by the INCH deserves to be kicked by the FOOT.

-- anonymous proverb

 

1. The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and

stupidity.

 

3. Money can't buy happiness. But it sure makes misery easier to live with.

 

6. The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody

appreciates how difficult it was.

 

9. Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you

can't find them.

 

10. The law of Probability Dispersal decrees that whatever it is

that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

 

11. Indecision is the key to flexibility.

 

12. There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation.

 

14. The facts, although interesting, are usually irrelevant.

 

15. The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.

 

16. Things are more like they are today than they ever have been before.

 

17. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

 

22. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.

 

23. This is as bad as it can get -- but don't bet on it.

 

24. Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it.

 

25. The trouble with life is that you are halfway through it before you

realize it's a "do it yourself" thing.

 

27. We can sympathize with a child who is afraid of the dark, but the

tragedy of life is that most people are afraid of the light.

 

29. Employ teenagers - while they know everything.

 

34. Why is there only one goverment agency overseeing monopolies?

 

35. Some day my ship will come in, but with my luck, I'll be at the airport.

 

They're multipurpose. Not only do they put the clips on, but

they take them off.

-- Pratt & Whitney spokesperson explaining why the

company charged the Air Force nearly $1000 for an

ordinary pair of pliers.

 

When more and more people are thrown out of work,

unemployment results,

-- Former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge

 

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese

-- Former French President Charles De Gaulle

 

A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money.

-- Everett Dirksen

 

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.

-- Samuel Goldwyn

 

Half this game is ninety percent mental.

-- Philadelphia Phillies manager Danny Ozark

 

Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

 

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

 

It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere.

 

One good turn gets most of the blankets.

 

Everytime you meet a situation, though you think at the time it is an

impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you

have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are

freer than you were before.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Honesty may not be the best policy, but it is worth trying once in a while.

-- former U.S. President and exceptionally dishonest

person Richard Nixon, as reported by Herbert Stein,

Chairman of the President's Council of Economic

Advisors under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

-- Confucius

 

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not

reached their level of incompetence.

 

A penny saved may be a penny earned, but it's a waste of a deposit slip and really pisses off the teller.

 

[An abstract term] both widens the scope of thought and clouds it. An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please and take them out again unobserved.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, arguing that democrats have

a special taste for abstract terms.

 

One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with in the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.

-- Jean Louis Gassee (was CEO of Apple, Inc.) on the

Apple Logo

 

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it."

-- Ellen Goodman

 

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

-- Goethe

 

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864, in a

letter to Col. William F. Elkins [Ref: "The Lincoln

Encyclopedia", Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950,

NY)]

 

How long will it be before ... the man sitting in London will see all things passing in Asia, or whenever it pleases him or an agent to turn a mirror on a view? It will be. Or how long before the discovery of cheap and perfect aerial navigation will change society and annihilate national distinctions? That, too, will be. These and a thousand stranger discoveries will during the ensuing century burst upon the world, changing it utterly.

-- Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune

Telling (1891)

 

An ounce of pretention is worth a pound of fact.

-- Glenn Miles (gmiles@yknet.yk.ca)

 

The test of leadership is not whether you have problems; it's

whether you have the same problems you had last year.

-- Winston Churchill

 

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability

to know, but as the essence of knowing.

-- James Gliek describing Feynman in "The Life and

Science of RichardFeynman"

 

I put my suitcase down, looked up at the Sears Tower and said: 'Chicago, here I am, and I'm gonna conquer you.' Then I looked down, and my suitcase was gone.

-- Scottie Pippen

 

'Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails

-- Mark Twain

 

Go out and live life - otherwise you won't have anything to talk about in the locker room."

-- Ruth Gordon in "Harold and Maude"

 

There are people with no more brains than you, but they have

one thing you don't have . . . they have a diploma!

-- The Wizard to the scarecrow in the "Wizard

of Oz"

 

The steady state of disks is full.

-- Ken Thompson

 

If at first you don't succeed, try reading the directions.

-- Anonymous

 

"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.

-- Mark Twain

 

Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth.

Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.

 

Beware: free advice is often overpriced!

 

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

-- Winston Churchill's Commentary on Man

 

Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.

-- Russian Proverb

 

No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.

-- C. Schulz

 

Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously;

and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work

seriously.

-- Booth Tarkington

 

When in doubt, tell the truth.

-- Mark Twain

 

I do not have signature authority. I am not authorized to sign anything. I am not authorized to commit the BRL, the DA, the DOD, or the US Government to anything, not even by implication. They do not tell me what their policy is. They may not have one.

-- Irving L. Chidsey

 

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

 

More things are explained by incompetence than by conspiracy.

-- Arthur Luehrmann

 

Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.

-- Gary Fowler

 

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may

steal the whole railroad.

-- Theodore Roosevelt

 

When a venture capitalist looks at a new company, the first thing they look at is management. The second thing they look at is finance. The third thing they look at is technology. If the management isn't there, they don't go any further. And that kills more new ideas than anything else.

-- Chris Willard,Manager High-Performance

Technologies, International Data Corp.

 

A momentary lapse of stupidity.

-- Dean Roehrich

 

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

-- Lewis Carrol

 

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