"Everything that can be invented - has already been invented"

AttributedCharles Duell, Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, 1899. Cf.Henry Ellsworth, a patent commissioner in 1843 who said something similar in a report to Congress: "The advancement of the arts, from yearto year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of thatperiod when human improvement must end."

"If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much."

Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense
Widely quoted, no citation found

"The future is already here -- it's just unevenly distributed."

William Gibson, widely quoted but I haven't found a citation

"The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers. "

Edgar R. Fiedler in The Three Rs of Economic Forecasting-Irrational, Irrelevant and Irreverent , June 1977
Courtesy Tren Griffin, May 2003

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In full, according to brainyquote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. "

"Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely"

Mark Anderson, SNS, 23 April 2003

"Often wrong, never in doubt"

Used everywhere, often in reference to CEOs and other opinonated big-ego leaders; also used in reference to columnists, scientists, surgeons. A couple of sites attributed this to Lev Landau: "Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt."

“Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves that these are not, after all, super men and women. They are human beings of remarkable skills and strength but frailer than most emotionally - because of their huge commitment of ego and ambition, and because the competition at their level of performance is so relentless.”

Comment: Also applicable to people in the uppermost reaches of corporate management

Source: Jim Klobuchar, 'Swiss Air': The ski jumper who astonished himself, Christian Science Monitor, 15 Feb 2002, http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0215/p01s02-ussc.html