"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come" --Victor
Hugo


"There's a fine line between genius and insanity" --Oscar Levant

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the
imagination" --John Dewey

"That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the
height of wisdom in the next" --John Stuart Mill

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless"
--Jean-jacques Rousseau

"Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of
innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change,
improvement and progress" --Theodore Levitt

"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems
were created" --Albert Einstein.

"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess"
--Isaac Newton.

"Success is on the far side of failure" --Thomas Watson Sr.

"That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time"
--John Stuart Mill

"If you're going through hell, keep going" --Sir Winston Churchill

If people oppose your innovative efforts remember these facts:


"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.

“Mr. Bell, after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very
interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no
commercial possibilities."  -- J. P. Morgan's comments on behalf of the
officials and engineers of Western Union after a demonstration of the
telephone.

"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.

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

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

"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.

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

"If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it." -- Albert
Einstein.

“At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and
mad men.” -- Aldous Huxley.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends upon the unreasonable man." --G. B. Shaw.

“I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged... and I
was assured by other Senators after we left the room that they had no
confidence in it." --Reaction of Senator Smith of Indiana after Samuel
Mores demonstrated his telegraph before member of Congress in 1842.

In 1908 Billy Durant, in trying to raise money to create an automobile
trust, boasted to J.P. Morgan &amp; Co. "that the time would come when half
a million automobiles a year will be running on the roads of this
country." This annoyed Morgan partner George W. Perkins who said "If
that fellow has any sense, he'll keep those observations to himself."
Unable to raise capital in Wall Street, Durant went home and put
together something called General Motors.

“A game in which you fly around in space and shoot up other space ships?
That is the stupidest idea that I have ever heard.” --Atari manager.