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WIT AND WISDOM

Oft-stated quote to first-year medical students at Johns Hopkins University from William Osler
"It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has."

Grossman's Misquote of R.L. Mencken:
"Complex Problems have simple, easy-to-understand wrong answers"

Westheimer's Rule:
"To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two, and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. Thus we allocate two days for a one-hour task."

Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis:
"If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented, it wasn't worth doing"

Weiler's Law:
"Nothing is impossible for people who don't have to do it themselves"

Ruckert's Law:
"There is nothing so small that it can't be blown out of proportion"

Churchill's Commentary on Man:
"People will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time they will pick themselves
up and continue on"

Murphy's Seventh Corollary:
"Every solution breeds new problems"

Weinberg's Corollary:
"An expert is a person who avoids making the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy"

First Law of Empirical Research:
"Certainty is an illusion"

 

FAMOUS PREDICTIONS

Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, London - 1895
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible"

RCA Executives - 1920
"This wireless music box [the radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay
to hear a message sent to nobody in particular?"

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

Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University - early 1929
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau"

Thomas Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM - 1943
"I think that there may be a world market for maybe five computers"

Ken Olson, Chair, Digital Equipment - 1977
"There's no possible reason anyone would ever want to have a computer in their home"

Bill Gates - 1981
"640K ought to be enough for everybody"

 

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