"Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis"  (All things change, and we change with them.)

"FUTURE, n.  That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured."
        from THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY by Ambrose Bierce

Murphy's Technology Law #2:  Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

Murphy's Technology Law #7: <br> All great discoveries are made by mistake.

On getting the future right!

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
    --Popular 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 business 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."
   --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.)

"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.

"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."

"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.

"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, Professor 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.

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

"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.

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

The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.
-- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876

"Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."
   -- Miyamoto Musashi, Japanese warrior and strategist

"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."
   -- Jon Kabat-Zinn

"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking."
   -- General George Patton

"We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to live the rest of our lives there."
   -- Charles Kettering

"It ain't so much the things you don't know that get you in trouble. It's the things you know that just ain't so."
   -- Artimus Ward, 1834-1867

"There is nothing to be learned from history anymore.  We're in science fiction now."
   -- Allen Ginsberg (1927 - 1997)

"How are you going to respond when the Clock-Radio of Challenge emits the Irritating Buzz of Opportunity? Are you going to roll over and hit the Snooze Button of Complacency? Or are you going to wake up and, after performing the Bodily Functions of Preparedness, boldly grasp the Toothbrush
of Tomorrow?
   -- Dave Barry

"Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans."
   -- A.J. Marshall

"The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit."
   -- Christian Nestell Bovee   (yeah...  I know.   Mike)

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
   --  Max Planck

"It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition."
   --Carl von Clausewitz

"You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
   -- Yogi Berra

"The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion -- these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.  But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness."
   -- Jerome S. Bruner ( b. 1915) U.S. psychologist, author, educational reformer, in "The Process of Education"

"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess."
   -- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English philosopher, mathematician

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
   -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-born U.S. physicist

"Do what you can with what you have where you are."
   --Theodore Roosevelt

Gumperson's Law:  The probability of a given event occurring is inversely proportional to its desirability.

On great advances in human history:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
   --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is impossible to express a really new principle in terms of a model following old laws."
   -- Max Planck (1858-1947)

Dan Quayle:

"The future will be better tomorrow."

"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur."

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.  Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
   -- Albert Einstein

"No amount of advance planning will ever replace dumb luck."
   --Anonymous

"If you see a bandwagon, it's too late."
   --Sir James Goldsmith

"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
   --George Bernard Shaw

"The world we have created today, as a result of our thinking thus far, has created problems that cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them."
   -- Albert Einstein

"Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties."
   --  Emil Nolde

"Science is the orderly arrangement of what, at the moment, seem to be the facts."
   --  Anon.

"The public have an insatiable curiousity to know everything.  Except what is worth knowing.  Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands."
   --  Oscar Wilde

"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
   --  Arthur Schopenhauer

"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
   --  Will Durant

"He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator."
   --  Francis Bacon

"Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror."
   --  Herb Brody

"No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future."
   --  Ian E. Wilson

"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what no one else has thought."
   --  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

"Anyone who thinks science fiction is about the future is being naive. Science fiction doesn't predict the future; it determines it, colonizes it, preprograms it in the image of the present."
   --  William Gibson

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
   --  Eugene V. Debs, address to jury, September, 1918

"Corrigan pointed to the resiliency of the financial and economic system over the past decade despite acts of terrorism, a major war, and the bursting of a stock market bubble. On the darker side, however, he noted that financial and public actors essentially have no ability to know or be able to predict the source of any future systemic shock. He concluded that although the probability of a systemic shock is lower now than in the past, the consequences of such a shock, if it occurs, would be much greater; hence, the importance of building better "shock absorbers" to contain any damage, which are outlined in the report."
   -- E. Gerald Corrigan at the "Top Ten Financial Risks to the Global Economy Conference held in New York on Sept 22-23, 2005 hosted by the Global markets Institute of Goldman Sachs in co-operation with the Brookings Institution, The Centre for Economic Policy Research, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, the School of Economics and management at Tsinghua University, and the Financial Institutions Centre at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.