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Walt Disney: Hi, I'm Walt Disney.
Wealthy Businessman: Hi, I'm a wealthy businessman.
Walt Disney: I want to make the first sound cartoon!
Wealthy Businessman: You fool, that will never work!
Walt Disney: I want to make the first feature-length cartoon!
Wealthy Businessman: You fool, that will never work!
Walt Disney: I want to build Me-Land!
Wealthy Businessman: You fool, that will never work!
Walt Disney: Hey look, I built Me-Land and it worked!
Wealthy Businessman: Good, now build more of them.
Wealthy Businessman: Hi, I'm a wealthy businessman.
Walt Disney: I want to make the first sound cartoon!
Wealthy Businessman: You fool, that will never work!
Walt Disney: I want to make the first feature-length cartoon!
Wealthy Businessman: You fool, that will never work!
Walt Disney: I want to build Me-Land!
Wealthy Businessman: You fool, that will never work!
Walt Disney: Hey look, I built Me-Land and it worked!
Wealthy Businessman: Good, now build more of them.
Aeronautics
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
— Ferdinand Foch, 1911 (interestingly, he would have a military aircraft carrier named after him
)
)"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
— Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895
"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
— Simon Newcomb, 1902
"Very interesting, Whittle my boy, but it will never work."
— Frank Whittle's Aeronautical Engineering teacher, on his turbojet
's Aeronautical Engineering teacher, on his turbojet"If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings."
— Milton Wright, father of the Wright brothers
Anime and Manga
"This is going to tank."
— Togame's comment at an Anime News Network discussion thread on the first promo video for Girls und Panzer
on the first promo video for Girls und Panzer Architecture
"We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection… of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower… To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years… we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal."
— Charles Alphand
Automobiles
"It looks like a poached egg—we can't make that."
— William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield upon seeing the design for the Morris Minor for the first time.
"Does it come with a can-opener?"
— A likely-apocryphal remark by an American automotive journalist, on the Citroën 2CV's debut at the 1948 Paris Motor Show.
"With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the US market"
— Businessweek, August 1968.
Biology
"The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear."
— Thomas Bell, the year after the publishing of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Comics
"Look, we didn't think it'd make for a successful comic book either, but here we are."
— Recap page in issue #6 of Money Shot
"This is an original fantasy book with no superheroes, two non-white leads and an opening chapter featuring graphic robot sex. I thought we might be cancelled by our third issue."
— Brian K. Vaughan, about Saga
"Come on, Stan, people hate spiders. They're creepy. And everybody knows that teenagers are sidekicks, not superheroes. This Spider-Man idea just won't sell."
— Martin Goodman, founder of Marvel Comics, 1962
Computers
"Get your feet off my desk. Get out of here. You stink. And we're not going to buy your product."
— Joe Keenan, President of Atari, responding to Steve Jobs' offer to sell him the rights to Apple
"The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
— Steve Jobs discussing the Kindle
"We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about."
— Larry Page, co-founder of Google
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
— Thomas J. Watson, CEO of IBM (attributed), 1943
"[In 1951,] I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."
— Lord Bowden, 1970
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
— Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones.[...] It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc.), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks."
— Linus Torvalds, 1991
"The Internet? We are not interested in it."
— Bill Gates, 1993
"Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney."
— Clifford Stoll, 1995
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
— Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, 1998
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
— Rob Malda on the iPod, 2001
Fashion
"Not one man I have spoken to likes a woman in mini skirts."
— Coco Chanel, 1969
Film — Animated
"No one's ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture."
— Lillian Disney to her husband Walt, on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
"I don't think this movie is gonna make a billion. I think it might still have a big opening weekend. I don't even know if it's gonna make it to Friday.(Side Note) I think word of mouth on this is gonna be...toxic. Whatever toxic goo there is at Nintendo world, it destroys stuff that it touches."
— Grace Randolph on the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which did gross a billion dollars after three weeks
of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which did gross a billion dollars after three weeks Film — Live-Action
"The cinema is an invention without any future."
— The Lumière Brothers
"Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage."
"I think if everybody was embracing the film before the fact the film could never live up to that expectation."
— James Cameron, on people predicting Avatar would fail
"I wonder if people realize how IMPOSSIBLE it is that Black Panther beat out The Last Jedi in four-day domestic openings. BP had a February release, one of the worst if not the worst time for a blockbuster movie, as opposed to TLJ’s Christmas release. BP is the only movie among the Top 10 domestic opening weekend record holders to be released in February. The previous highest February opening weekend was Deadpool at $130 million, which BP beat by $70 million. BP also opened at 200 fewer theaters than TLJ, 4,020 to TLJ’s 4,232. In fact, BP opened at the fewest number of theaters among the Top 10 highest opening weekend record holders, and you won’t find a comparable number of theaters until number 18, Furious 7, which opened at 4,004 theaters.
In other words, BP had everything going against it compared to TLJ–bad release date, fewer theaters, lesser known characters from a smaller brand, not a main “storyline” movie like TLJ was, saddled with the conventional wisdom that Black-led movies are niche products without wider appeal. Yet BP went out, beat all projections, and smashed records. The scope of its achievement is staggering at every level."
In other words, BP had everything going against it compared to TLJ–bad release date, fewer theaters, lesser known characters from a smaller brand, not a main “storyline” movie like TLJ was, saddled with the conventional wisdom that Black-led movies are niche products without wider appeal. Yet BP went out, beat all projections, and smashed records. The scope of its achievement is staggering at every level."
— This post on Black Panther (2018)
on Black Panther (2018)"Burn the negative and collect the insurance."
— Producer Aaron Russo on the initial cut of Dirty Dancing
"Forget it, Louis. No Civil War picture ever made a nickel."
— David O. Selznick to Louis B. Mayer on Gone with the Wind
"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face, and not Gary Cooper."
— Gary Cooper on turning down the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind
"I'm sorry gentlemen, but these books aren't even television material."
— Irving Allen on adapting the James Bond books to the big screen
"Connery just quit movies after this one, which he only agreed to do because he was bitter over turning down a part called "Gandalf" in a movie about midgets or some shit...a decision that cost him $450 million dollars — the guy could have his own tropical island nation today if he had just asked someone else, 'Hey, is this Tolkien guy any good?' But then the money gods who had favored him for so many decades pitied him and gave him another chance: They also offered him a role in The Matrix, though he hasn't confirmed which one. Once again Connery couldn't make heads or tails of it and turned it down, and once again the movie went on to make big bucks."
"I was going into that movie expecting it to be garbage. It was gonna be the guy from The Kissing Booth and the guy from Purple Hearts in a love story. Right? Terrible. But no, actually it was very, very cute."
— Kennie J.D., about Red, White & Royal Blue
"In Christmas of '76, six months before it opened. I said to Carrie, 'Hey, you know what? They're showing the trailer at the Avco-Embassy. Let's go stick our heads in.' And all I know is that at the end of the trailer, it says 'A billion years in the making. Star Wars, and it's coming to your galaxy this summer,' and there's a big explosion, and some wise-guy in the back goes 'Yeah, and it's coming to late-night TV about two months after that!'"
— Mark Hamill on Star Wars
"I thought for sure it was direct-to-video... it just seemed like such a simple story. Guy looking for his daughter. [mimes leafing through a script] Ho hum. Hmm. Ooh, he finds her!"
— Liam Neeson on Taken, 60 Minutes
"The movie that was going to bankrupt Carolco. The most expensive independent movie of all time. Everyone from Larry King to CNN; everyone was destroying the whole thing. I was on the boat in Cannes listening to all the nonsense. Then, of course, the movie opens, and like they say, every success has many fathers. Everyone suddenly became like they knew it was going to be a big hit. They forgot all the bad and terrible things they were saying about Carolco. There were so many fluids, moving elements and it was so expensive for those days, but I went for it, and it paid off."
"We labored the last six months on Titanic in the absolute knowledge that the studio would lose $100 million. It was a certainty."
Film Actors
"Can't act. Balding. Dances a little."
— Apocryphal note from Fred Astaire screen test
"He's ruining the movie!"
— Michael Eisner, about Johnny Depp, while watching a preview of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
"And last, but not least, my agent, who about ten years ago advised me that I had no business being an actor. Thank you."
— Jack Nicholson in his first Oscar acceptance speech
Literature
"The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed…We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book…Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature — since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist."
— Henry F. Chorley, reviewing Moby-Dick
Locations
"'Kid,' he said, 'someday there'll be 50 hotels here and it'll be the entertainment capital of America.' I thought to myself, 'No wonder they call him Bugsy.'"
said, 'someday there'll be 50 hotels here and it'll be the entertainment capital of America.' I thought to myself, 'No wonder they call him Bugsy.'" Music
"Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished."
— Dick Rowe, Decca Recording Company executive, 1962 (turning down The Beatles)note
Interviewer: During this period, you didn’t think to give up? Do something else?
Booba: I was already doing something else. I never dreamed of becoming a rapper. I was doing it because I loved it. Otherwise we would never have left with a finalized album (with Lunatic), practically up to the cover: it proves that we were not starving. It was not an end in itself. I imagine that in the amount of 45 Scientific, it was a completely different investment, right? Even then, we were not too pretentious. We said to ourselves, “if we sell 50,000 Mauvais Œil, that’s a lot of money”. We sold more than twice, more than 100,000 copies, it was awesome, and then it was on !
(...)
Interviewer: Gold record on an independent label, without mainstream radio support, without anything…
Booba: I was already doing something else. I never dreamed of becoming a rapper. I was doing it because I loved it. Otherwise we would never have left with a finalized album (with Lunatic), practically up to the cover: it proves that we were not starving. It was not an end in itself. I imagine that in the amount of 45 Scientific, it was a completely different investment, right? Even then, we were not too pretentious. We said to ourselves, “if we sell 50,000 Mauvais Œil, that’s a lot of money”. We sold more than twice, more than 100,000 copies, it was awesome, and then it was on !
(...)
Interviewer: Gold record on an independent label, without mainstream radio support, without anything…
— Booba about his first album with Ali (they were the hip-hop duo Lunatic from 1994 to 2003), in a 2008 interview.
about his first album with Ali (they were the hip-hop duo Lunatic from 1994 to 2003), in a 2008 interview."He's not going to go far, is he? He's just not star material."
— Judy Willis on David Bowie
"I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there is no way that a K-pop boy group will make it big in the States."
— John Seabrook, writing for The New Yorker, 2015
The New Yorker, 2015"You better keep to your trucks, boy, 'cause you're never going to be a musician."
— A man to Elvis Presley
"Male vocal in the 1968 feeling—thin, piercing voice with no emotional appeal...dreary songs...one-key singer...pretentious material."
— The BBC's review of Elton John's first single, "Lady Samantha"
"You'll sink, like a lead balloon... no, no, even faster; like a lead zeppelin."
"2013 Grammys" Todd: Does anyone really care about John Legend? I mean, I didn't even know he had a song out this year, uh... Did you?
"2 Months Later" Todd: GOD DAMN MOTHER—! HOW AM I SO BAD AT THIS? Just once I want to say something doesn't matter and have it not matter!
"2 Months Later" Todd: GOD DAMN MOTHER—! HOW AM I SO BAD AT THIS? Just once I want to say something doesn't matter and have it not matter!
— Todd in the Shadows on "All of Me"
"All of Me""Guitar is a good hobby, John, but you'll never make a living of it."
— John Lennon's Aunt Mimi
"I'm a songwriter and that's no hit."
— Michael Nesmith on The Monkees' "I'm a Believer"
"I've heard they have beautiful lights but they don't sound like nothing."
— Jimi Hendrix on Pink Floyd
"No one had much faith in me because I was so young. They imagined a little brat with a flash-in-the-pan single."
Newspapers
"Fortunately, the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten."
— An editorial from The New Republic, 1925, on the Crossword Puzzle
Physics
"If Einstein's equation and Aston's curve are even roughly correct, as I'm sure they are, for Dr. Cameron and I have computed with their aid the maximum energy evolved in radioactive change and found it to check well with observation, then this supposition of an energy evolution through the disintegration of the common elements is from the one point of view a childish Utopian dream, and from the other a foolish bugaboo."
— Robert Andrews Millikan, on nuclear fission
"The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."
— Ernest Rutherford, 1933
Pinball
"Amazing that for years people told me a Rush pin would never sell against my arguing there should be one. Stern sells out all 1000 of the LE edition @ $11k each within an hour."
— Pinside user cranie on Rush (2022)
on Rush (2022) Politics
"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
"There will never be a revolution in Russia."
— Anton Chekhov, Letters of Anton Chekhov, Feb 9, 1888
"HITLER TAMED BY PRISON. Released on parole, he is expected to return to Austria◊"
◊"— The New York Times, 1924
"Hitler is now definitely cut off from power. He is even, if I may say so, cut off from the hope of coming to power."
— Léon Blum, 1932
"Hitler's disappearance from the political scene is likely."
— Oreste Rosenfeld, January 1, 1933
"An agent had suggested Ronald Reagan for the lead. We all had a good laugh. He was by no means a bad actor, but he would hardly be convincing, I said with the eerie prescience which has earned me the title the American Nostradamus, as a presidential candidate."
— Gore Vidal on The Best Man
"I don't think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime."
"Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for President as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke."
— Seth Meyers, in front of the future POTUS at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011
Bill Maher: Ann, which Republican candidate has the best chance of winning the general election?
Ann Coulter: Of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump.
(Cue mass laughter)
Ann Coulter: Of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump.
(Cue mass laughter)
— Real Time with Bill Maher, 2015
"Remember, Donald Trump was, once upon a time, a failed Reform Party candidate. Tucker Carlson was once booed at CPAC. Times change."
. Tucker Carlson was once booed at CPAC. Times change."— Matt Lewis, The Daily Beast, "Pence and Haley Aren’t the Future of the GOP--They’re Roadkill", 2021
", 2021"During my race, so many of my opponents would say, "well, he's just an organizer. He's not ready for Congress." Now I'm here, a year into the job, and I think we've had a very successful year, especially for a freshman office in the minority."
— U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL), in an interview with Good Good Good, "Why Rep. Maxwell Frost Is Hopeful About Gen Z's Future in Politics"
" Radio
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
— A Western Union internal memo, 1876
Sports
"Huh. Another new game."
— Frank Mahan, upon hearing of Basketball
"Poor build. Very skinny and narrow. Ended the '99 season weighing 195 pounds and still looks like a rail at 211. Looks a little frail and lacks great physical stature and strength. Can get pushed down more easily than you'd like. Lacks mobility and ability to avoid the rush. Lacks a really strong arm. Can't drive the ball down the field and does not throw a really tight spiral. System-type player who can get exposed if he must ad-lib and do things on his own."
— Tom Brady's scouting report for the 2000 NFL Draft
"He possesses minimal football knowledge and lacks motivation."
— Early scouting report on NFL coach Vince Lombardi
"[Tom Tatham] had a fellow named Ted Keefer who worked for him, who was their advisor ... and Ted said "put that son of a bitch up" and said "I've seen him enough". This was another time and Pete Logan said ... "Mr. Keefer, the roses look mighty pretty around his neck." And Ted said, "the only time that son of a bitch'll have roses on him is when he's 6 feet under the ground." ... [Then they put him in the summer sale] at Keeneland, he was going to go for 10, 11, 12 thousand; I jumped in and started bidding, bought him back for 17. I took the ticket out to Tom behind the pavillion and said "Tom, I bought that Colt back for you, the Wishing Well colt 'cause he went too cheap" and he said "Arthur, we don't want him 'cause Ted doesn't like him" ... I stuck [the sales slip] in my shirt pocket and I remember thinking "Well, I guess I just blew another 17,000." I owed a lot of money at the time."
— Arthur Hancock III on Sunday Silence
Telephony
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."
— Another Western Union internal memo, 1876
"The telephone is a curious device that might fairly find place in the magic of Arabian Tales. Of what use is such an invention?"
— A newspaper reporter, 1876
"...it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
— Steve Ballmer, then-CEO of Microsoft, on the iPhone, 2007
Television
"People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box all night."
— Darryl F. Zanuck, President of 20th Century Fox, declining to invest in the television set
"TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."
— The New York Times, 1939
"Now, Disney's got a new 'Star Wars' streaming show that fans never asked for in this prequel of a prequel about the third lead from 'Rogue One'... and it's the best thing they've ever made?"
— Honest Trailers on Andor
"[TV comedy is] dead. Forever. Bury it."
— Lewis Erlicht passing on The Cosby Show, 1984
"We were driving through the Kent countryside, and my mum was reading the paper. She said "oooh, they're going to change Doctor Who. It's going to be Tom Baker next." And I remember being absolutely outraged. How dare they change the Doctor! How dare they turn Jon Pertwee into Tom Baker! He'll be rubbish!"
"I can't see that face on a lunchbox."
— Brandon Tartikoff before reluctantly allowing Michael J. Fox to be cast on Family Ties
"Connie and I wrote that first episode and we sent it in to Jimmy Gilbert, the executive whose job it was to assess the quality of the writing said, and I can quote [his note to me] fairly accurately, "This is full of clichéd situations and stereotypical characters and I cannot see it as being anything other than a disaster". And Jimmy himself said, "You're going to have to get them out of the hotel, John. You can't do the whole thing in the hotel". Whereas, of course, it's in the hotel that the whole pressure cooker builds up."
— John Cleese on Fawlty Towers
"Overall reactions to this pilot were not very favorable. Interest in the show was very narrow."
"I was given the script and the manga it was based on... But I thought, "Who's going to watch this? It's a late night show on TV Tokyonote about a guy that eats food all by himself. There's no way audience will enjoy this." I expected this to be a laughing stock a few years later and wasn't something I wanted to tell people about."
— Yutaka Matsushige, on his long-runner TV Show, Kodoku no Gurume
"They said of casting David Tennant as Casanova, 'Damn, you should have cast someone sexier.' With Benedict Cumberbatch, we were told the same thing. 'You promised us a sexy Sherlock, not him.'"
"I'm told there is a visitor for me, and it's Patrick Stewart, who I'd not seen in years. Patrick told me, "I'm doing a science fiction thing." I asked him what and he told me Star Trek and I told him, "Oh no, not that hackneyed thing!" And he responded, "Well, it will be a nice little pension for me.""
"The final shot of the CSM walking amongst the alien artefacts that are tucked away at the Pentagon is a real appetite whetter. Imagine if this really was a standalone TV movie; the untapped potential would have been an extraordinary waste....There is something a little off about the chemistry between Anderson and Duchovny at some points in the first episode – his performance screams of trying to enjoy this for as long as it lasts and hers occasionally tips into 'what am I doing here?' How little they both knew that this was going to change their lives."
"Ever the fighting one, María Teresa [Campos] kept betting on her ideals, even if they tried to get them out of her head. And so, she was the first to introduce analysis of political news in a morning magazine, back when [TV] magazines were still considered shallow content for an audience catalogued under the backwards and sexist tag of "marujas". Very few believed the news to be essential content in a morning show, and yet, her debate table became the most watched segment in Telecinco's Día a día. All those disbelieving networks who ran away from this formula in their morning shows would later copy it."
Theatre
"No jokes, no tits, no chance!"
— Michael Todd during the intermission of Away We Go, later renamed Oklahoma!
Transportation
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bon-fire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense."
— Napoléon Bonaparte on the steamship
"My grandfather's reply was simple and final: 'All nothing but nonsense. The railways are a mere fad, and will soon be done away with. Yes, within three years; and then we shall be entirely back to the horses and coaches again.'"
— Ernest Thompson-Seton
Video Games
"I wasn't sure if people besides me would even like Spamton. Some test players seemed to regard him as 'I hate looking at him,' and 'scary.'
Now Fangamer's sold out of their Spamton-themed promotional trash and have to order 7 times more to meet demand...
... uh, is that good?"
Now Fangamer's sold out of their Spamton-themed promotional trash and have to order 7 times more to meet demand...
... uh, is that good?"
"For my personal experience with Demon's Souls, when it was close to final I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game. I said, 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' So I put it aside.
Luckily, third party publishers, Atlus in North America and Namco in Europe, stepped in and it really became a great hit outside of Japan. We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint, including studio management side. We were not able to see the value of the product we were making."
Luckily, third party publishers, Atlus in North America and Namco in Europe, stepped in and it really became a great hit outside of Japan. We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint, including studio management side. We were not able to see the value of the product we were making."
— Shuhei Yoshida on 2009's Demon's Souls
"No one buys a game specifically for multiplayer options."
— George Wood, Gaming in the Clinton Years episode on GoldenEye (1997), circa late 1990s
"Hiding from your enemies? That's not a game!"
— Anecdotal response to Hideo Kojima's initial pitch for Metal Gear
"When [Metroid Prime] was first announced, we thought it was going to suck. How wrong we were. How wrong we were."
"Considering how much of the Nintendo fanbase I've encountered over the years that loudly dismissed shooters and online play, I don't really expect it to do all that well, even among Nintendo's diehard crowd."
2017 Paul: "Yes, Zelda will give the Switch a stronger launch than the Wii U, almost automatically. But even there, there are caveats. With effectively four new games at launch, you either have to like Zelda, or you won’t buy a Switch, it’s as simple as that. And while the gaming bubbles of the internet are going nuts over Breath of the Wild, it’s important to remember that it’s games like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros.. that are Nintendo’s absolute biggest hits, not Zelda titles (though of course they sell well). They are vast, complex RPGs, and while great games, have a smaller audience than many believe. That may change with Breath of the Wild, which could expand the series’ reach simply by being that good, but at launch, the Switch is in effect a $360 copy of Zelda, which is no small order."
2018 Paul: While I will take responsibility for much of the stupidness here, boy was it really hard to imagine Breath of the Wild being that good. There was no talk of an anemic launch line-up for the Switch after it was released because quite simply, Zelda was the only thing you actually needed to play. There are system-sellers, and there is Breath of the Wild, on a different plane of existence altogether. And just when that glow started to fade, Mario Odyssey came along and was nearly as good on its own.
2018 Paul: While I will take responsibility for much of the stupidness here, boy was it really hard to imagine Breath of the Wild being that good. There was no talk of an anemic launch line-up for the Switch after it was released because quite simply, Zelda was the only thing you actually needed to play. There are system-sellers, and there is Breath of the Wild, on a different plane of existence altogether. And just when that glow started to fade, Mario Odyssey came along and was nearly as good on its own.
— Paul Tassi, It's Time To Revisit How Wrong I Was About The Nintendo Switch, Forbes
, Forbes"No one on Youtube will watch tihs."
— paulinehtor, a Twitch user watching a speedrun attempt, immortalized by Summoning Salt's The History of Wii Sports Resort Golf
"I was stupid enough to sell them rights to the whole bunch. They offered me a percentage of their profits. I said, ‘No, there will be no profit at all — give me all my money right now! The whole amount.’ It was stupid. I was stupid enough to leave everything in their hands because I didn’t believe in their success. But who could foresee their success? I couldn’t."
— Andrzej Sapkowski on his decision to sell the game rights to The Witcher
Weapons
"I consider machine guns an absurdity in a field army of normal composition."
— Mikhail Ivanovich Dragomirov
"Aero planes are interesting toys but of no military value."
— Ferdinand Foch, 1910
"That thing will never make a fighter."
— Ernst Udet on the Messerschmitt Bf 109
Wrestling
"It was obvious that things weren't going to change for the mid-carders, and any of them able to get out of the promotion was doing just that. On June 30 [1999], Chris Jericho signed with the WWF. In the six months prior to his contract signing, WCW had made very little effort to retain him... Many of the wrestlers in WCW were upset, because Jericho was well liked, and they couldn't believe the company wouldn't offer him a good deal while it was throwing money away on limos, Humvees, fired NBA stars and rappers. Instead, Chris Jericho, who had always been told that he was too small, couldn't sell tickets, and wasn't a ratings draw, made his debut later that summer in a confrontation with The Rock and helped Raw obliterate Nitro in the ratings that evening by over four points."
— R. D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez, The Death of WCW
"The next day, one of the guys asked for my impression of Rocky. "Hey, he's a nice guy," I said, "but he just doesn't have it. The office should really cut their losses and get rid of the guy." I had no idea I was talking about the future People's and Corporate Champion."
— Mick Foley
Other
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
— Clarke's First Law
In-Universe
Music
""Weird Al" Yankovic, your fifteen minutes are up."
— UHF
Web Animation
Belle: Lucks, I don’t know about you, but most people don’t need some janky VR to play video games...
Lucks: You know, they said the same thing when I invented the Meta Runner arm. And now, you can’t even make a name for yourself without one.
Lucks: You know, they said the same thing when I invented the Meta Runner arm. And now, you can’t even make a name for yourself without one.
