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

14. "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." --Lord Kelvin,
president, Royal Society, 1895.

15. "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.

16. "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.

17. "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.

18. "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.

19. "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.

20. "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
--Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

21. "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." --Marechal
Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

22. "Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell,
Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

23. "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction". --Pierre Pachet,
Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

24. "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.