“The foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialization will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments.”

“Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.”

“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

“There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”

“But what ... is it good for?”

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”

"Radio has no future."

“Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean.”

“There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.”

“Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.”

“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.”

“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?”

“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.”

“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it. . . . Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.”

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

“[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of.”