The Art of Being Wrong...

Andrea J Chee ( ajc6@ukc.ac.uk )
Sat, 2 Mar 1996 00:07:05 +0000 (GMT)


Hello all...

Something for the weekend...:-)

Wishes & Dreams...

- ANDREA


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   ***   The world is full of Kings and Queens...       *** 
   ***   Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams...   ***
   ***          ...It's Heaven and Hell...              ***
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From: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great 
	Britain (The Book of Heroic Failures)



"Heaven and earth were created all together in the same instant, on 
October 23rd, 4004 BC at nine o'clock in the morning."
- Dr John Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University just before 
the publication of Darwin's _Origin of the Species_

"We don't like their sound.  Groups of guitars are on the way out."
- Decca Recording Company when turning down the Beatles in 1962 (The 
group were also turned down by Pye, Columbia and HMV)

"The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor king 
of thing.  Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation 
of these atoms is talking moonshine."
- Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) after he had split the atom for the first 
time.

"You will never amount to very much"
- A Munich Schoolmaster to Albert Einstein, aged 10.

"Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our 
extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr Rippingille"
- John Hunt (1775-1848)

"I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the 
existence of atoms and other such dogmas"
- Ernst Mach (1838-1916), professor of physics at the University of Vienna.

"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if 
not utterly impossible."
- Simon Newcomb (1835-1909).  The first flight by the Wright brothers 
eighteen months afterwards did not affect his opinion.

"I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms.  What a giftless 
bastard!  It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a 
genius.  Why, in comparison with him, Raff is a genius."
- Tchaikovsky's diary, 9 October 1886.

"If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will 
soon fall into disuse."
- Philip Hale, Boston music critic, 1837.

"Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles.  The earth does not have 
limbs and muscles; therefore it does not move."
- Scipio Chiaramonti.

"Rail travel at high speed is not possible, because passengers, unable to 
breathe, would die of asphyxia"
- Dr Dionysys Lardner (1793-1859), professor of natural philosophy and 
astronomy at University College, London.  He also asserted that no large 
steamship would ever be able to cross the Atlantic, since it would 
require more coal than it could carry.  Two years later the _Great 
Western_ crossed the Atlantic.