"I expect to win it. Sit back, put your feet up in front of the TV, relax and enjoy it. Let me do the worrying - that's what I get paid for."
-- England manager Graham Taylor before the 1992 European championships. England didn't win a game. "I have always found strangers sexy."
-- Hugh Grant, six months before he was arrested with stranger Divine Brown. "I would not wish to be Prime Minister, dear."
-- Margaret Thatcher in 1973. "That rainbow song's no good. Take it out."
-- MGM memo after first showing of The Wizard Of Oz. "You'd better learn secretarial skills or else get married."
-- Modelling agency, rejecting Marilyn Monroe in 1944. "Radio has no future." "X-rays are clearly a hoax". "The aeroplane is scientifically impossible."
-- Royal Society president Lord Kelvin, 1897-9. "You ought to go back to driving a truck."
-- Concert manager, firing Elvis Presley in 1954. "Forget it. No Civil War picture ever made a nickel."
-- MGM executive, advising against investing in Gone With The Wind. "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little."
-- A film company's verdict on Fred Astaire's 1928 screen test. "Very interesting, Whittle, my boy, but it will never work."
-- Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cambridge, shown Frank Whittle's plan for the jet engine. "There will be one million cases of AIDS in Britain by 1991."
-- World Health Organisation in a 1989 report. It over-estimated by 992,301 cases. "The Beatles? They're on the wane."
-- The Duke of Edinburgh in Canada, 1965. They went on to produce a string of No 1s. "The atom bomb will never go off - and I speak as an expert in explosives."
-- U.S. Admiral William Leahy in 1945. "All saved from Titanic after collision."
-- New York Evening Sun, April 15 1912. "Brain work will cause women to go bald."
-- Berlin professor, 1914. "Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine."
-- Radio Times editor Rex Lambert, 1936. "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-- Director of the US Patent Office, 1899. "And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam."
-- Newsweek magazine, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s. | 
