“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” (Charles H Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899.)
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” (HM Warner, Warner Bros, 1927.)
“We don’t like their sound and guitar music is on the way out.” (Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles, 1962.)
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” (Nashville club owner, Jim Denny, firing Elvis Presley after his first performance.)
“So we went to Atari and said, ‘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.’ They said ‘No’. Then we went to Hewlett-Packard; they said, ‘We don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet’.” (Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs on how he tried to get Atari and HP interested in the personal computer he and Steve Wozniak had devised).