My buddy does the same thing with his Costco membership, swears he saves money but never adds up the impulse buys in the middle aisles. We all track the stuff that proves our point and ignore the rest, which is why your wife is probably half right.

Naphtha and 200 lever pulls beats a $90 repair bill.

The Ken Olsen one from 1977 gets me every time, where the head of Digital Equipment said there's no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. That guy ran a whole computer company and couldn't see it. Same deal with the 1981 quote about 640K, people forget that one might not even be real but everyone repeats it anyway. Here's the thing though, the ones that age worst are always from the guy who should know better, not some random columnist. When the expert in the field says the thing is impossible, that's the one that ends up on a poster 40 years later. If you want the worst one, go find what the head of the patent office supposedly said about closing up shop because everything had been invented. That one still gets passed around like it just happened yesterday.