• "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 Organization 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 Number 1 hits.

• "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.