"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enterprises—putting one in terms of a percentage of the other. For example, if it be calculated that the profits of these enterprises in excess of the approved level be one hundred million dollars, and the total wages bill of the same enterprises two billion dollars, the amount of wage increase to be awarded should be stated as 5 per cent. That is, the wage increase to be awarded should total 5 per cent. ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... inapprehensible relation between all past and all future conditioned-being,—the tremendous question remains: What signifies the whole of apparitional existence to the Unconditioned? As flickers of sheet-lightning leave no record in the night, so in that Darkness a million billion trillion universes might come and go, and leave no trace ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... corporations produced by modern industrial conditions, it would be necessary to increase in like fashion the activity of the sovereign power which alone could control such corporations. As has been aptly said, the only way to meet a billion-dollar corporation is by invoking the protection of a hundred-billion-dollar government; in other words, of the National Government, for no State Government is strong enough both to do justice to corporations and to exact justice from them. Said Senator Davis in this admirable address, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... hours, at the rate we have mentioned, of one mile in a minute. This will give us a line one hundred and eighty miles long by one broad, and covering one hundred and eighty square miles. Now, allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have one billion, one hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock. As every pigeon consumes fully half a pint of food a day, the quantity required to feed such a flock for one day must be eight million, seven hundred ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... system, which was started in England 73 years ago, eliminates most of these waste expenses. The system has kept spreading at an astonishing rate; in Great Britain there are now 3 1/2 million members, and more than a billion of sales a year. Other European countries are full of these stores. Many of the retail stores have from twelve thousand to fifty thousand members; their sales run into the millions. They are federated in a wholesale agency which buys for them ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... during my sojourn in France in the summer of 1916. Every woman of every class (with a few notable exceptions seen for the most part in the Ritz Hotel) was working at something or other: either in self-support, to relieve distress, or to supplement the efforts and expenditures of the Government (two billion francs a month); and it seemed that I never should see the last of those relief organizations of infinite variety ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... reliable data are unavailable, gross domestic product is lower than 12 years ago because of the loss of labor and capital and the disruption of trade and transport. GDP: exchange rate conversion - $3 billion, per capita $200; real growth rate 0% (1989 est.) Inflation rate (consumer prices): over 90% (1991 est.) Unemployment rate: NA% Budget: revenues NA; expenditures NA, including capital expenditures of NA Exports: $236 million (f.o.b., FY91 est.) ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... for chickens and eggs in the United States would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!). It is solemnly recorded that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred eggs ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... watch your least gesture with anxiety. Queens will have you brought to their palaces to make them laugh and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their mascot and write love-letters to you from the trenches. I will have a billion pictures made of you, and you shall breathe and move in all of them. You shall live a million lives at once. I will have your other self placed in museums so that centuries from now they can take you out and bring ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the star what lighted Pale billion to its fated doom, Our nuptial song is blighted, And its rose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... meditated about aesthetics, but he meditated also about politics, logic, philosophy, political economy, ethics—everything. Socrates was a causeur, but he was also a martyr. No, after all the Beautiful is not so important as you imagine you are. No doubt for a few billion years painters and musicians and epigrammatists will remain the centre cf creation; but when the sun grows cold it is conceivable that invaluable canvases may be used up as fuel, and that humanity may sacrifice even your printed paradoxes ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... a billion ages a bird should come from a far distant clime and carry off in its bill one little grain of sand, the time would finally come when the last grain of sand would be carried away. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the confidante, the counsellor, the optimistic teacher, and the appreciative audience for six children and a husband, besides a lot of neighbors who carried their troubles to her. She performed more mental work than it takes to manage a billion dollar trust. She kept six children, not only out of mischief, but happily busy at all sorts of household and outdoor work which it was well for them to know. They learned to keep house and farm ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... Theodore, I could throw statistics at you till you wuz black and blue, about our country spendin' for what is useless and ruinous to soul, body and estate, one billion four hundred millions a year, and about the hundred thousand drunkards that stumble along into the staggerin' slobberin' ranks every year, and drop into the drunkard's grave. I could eppisode eloquent to you about all this but what's the use; you're ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... generated in these coils are strong enough to process all the protons so that their axis of spin is brought into alignment. At this point, the plastic could be thought of as representing a few billion tiny gyroscopes all ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... other damn fools who come out two billion miles to scratch rock, as if there weren't enough already on the inner planets. He's got a rich platinum property. Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for his clothes ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... than Providence! Don't tell me about the vain illusions of self-love. There is nothing so real in this world as Illusion. All other things may desert a man, but this fair angel never leaves him. She holds a star a billion miles over a baby's head, and laughs to see him clawing and batting himself as he tries to reach it. She glides before the hoary sinner down the path which leads to the inexorable gate, jingling the keys ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... gone over the hill. What was it he had said? I feel the walls of the ship holding me in like the bars of a cell. Out there was Earth, population approximately eight billion or so. And up here is the ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation. Except for the agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the place where we sat was pretty quiet. There were a million flies, and there seemed to be a billion. You wouldn't have thought, unless you had been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the world. By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the track of war was absolutely sown with these ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... universal that even the beasts understand it and cock applauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while the magazine writers now address the million, the composers and singers and players make their bows to the billion. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... now showed by unmistakable signs that a terrible conflict was about to take place, and when the two armies—which the Hindus claim numbered several billion men—came face to face, Krishna delayed the fight long enough to recite with Arjuna a dialogue of eighteen cantos called the Bhagavad-gita, or Divine Song, which contains a complete system of Indian ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... sewers. This water was brought close to the eastward edge of the city by a huge canal, and then raised by an enormous battery of pumps into reservoirs at a level of four hundred feet above the sea, from which it spread by a billion arterial branches over the city. Thence it poured down, cleansing, sluicing, working machinery of all sorts, through an infinite variety of capillary channels into the great drains, the cloacae maximae, and so carried the sewage out to the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... escaped the jaws of the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very wide door; he had escaped the albicore and squid: his life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him born in the same year, he and a few others ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... will be heads. So if '17' had come up five times to-night, it would be just as likely to come the sixth as if the previous five had not occurred, and that despite the fact that before it had appeared at all odds against a run of the same number six times in succession are about two billion, four hundred and ninety-six million, and some thousands. Most systems are based on the old persistent belief that occurrences of chance are affected in some way by occurrences immediately preceding, but disconnected physically. If we've had a run of black ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... that everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to the following of them as a matter of course.... Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good, and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher, he will probably laugh ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... discover That you find in me the man and lover You have divined and visualized, In quiet day dreams. And what is strange Your boy of eight is subtly guised In fleeting looks that half resemble Something in me. Two souls may range Mid this earth's billion souls for life, And hide their hunger or dissemble. For there are two at least created, Endowed with alien powers that draw, And kindred powers that by some law Bind souls as like as sister, brother. There are two at least who are for each other. If we are such, it is not fated ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountains from me, well ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... horses and sheep are herded in millions. Argentina has over twenty-nine million cattle, seventy-seven million sheep, seven and a half million horses, five and a half million mules, a quarter- million of donkeys, and nearly three million swine and three million goats. Four billion dollars of British capital are ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... of glaciation in those States does not differ materially from its effect all over southern Canada and the northern United States from New England to Kansas and Minnesota. Each year the people of these regions are richer by perhaps a billion dollars because the ice scraped its way down from Laurentia and spread out over the borders of the great plains on the west and of the Appalachian ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he was safely ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... tomb and no mourner's gloom, No tolling bell in the steeple, But in one swift breath a painless death For a million billion people. What greater bliss could we ask than this, To sweep with a bird's free motion Through leagues of space to a resting place, In a vast and vapoury ocean - To pass away from this life for aye With never a dear tie ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... determine; but if, as he implies, force and atoms are simple and ultimate, then evolution is as fortuitous as a sand-storm, or more so. All prior to force and atoms is "behind the veil." "The material universe is composed of ether, matter, and energy." [58] Ether is a billion times more elastic than air, "almost infinitely rare," [59] its oscillations must be at least seven hundred billions per second, "it exerts no gravitating or retarding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to confess some uncertainty about his original dogma as to the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... two or three bags to each boat, the treatment of even a large reservoir may be accomplished in from four to six hours. It is necessary, of course, to reduce as much as possible the time required for applying the copper, so that for immense supplies, with a capacity of several billion gallons, it would probably be desirable to use a launch, carrying long projecting spars to which could be attached bags containing several hundred ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... and inaudible, so there were lights visible and invisible. The imperfection of our eye as a detector of ether vibrations was, however, far more serious. The eye could detect ether vibrations lying within a single octave—between 400 to 800 billion vibrations per second. Comparatively slow vibrations of ether did not affect our eye and the disturbances they give rise to well-known as electric waves. The electric waves, predicted by Maxwell, were discovered by Hertz. These waves were about three metres long. They were ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... subjective and untrue to the world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... fellow, might just as well give a sly kick with his heel to the granite,) before time will be at an end, and the burden of flesh accomplished. But you hear it expressed in terms that will astonish Baron Rothschild, what is the progress in liquidation which we make for each particular century. A billion of centuries pays off a quantity equal to a pinch of snuff. Despair seizes a man in contemplating a single coupon, no bigger than a visiting card, of such a stock as this; and behold we have to keep on paying away ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of multi-billion-dollar budgets and farm surpluses that cost forty thousand dollars per hour for warehouse rental, twenty-five hundred dollars is still a tidy sum to dangle before the eyes of any individual. This was the reward offered ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... we help finding people? Could a billion and a half human beings die, all at once, without leaving a single ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... diamond sun arose, and tossed A billion gems across the sea. "The Slave of God is lost, is lost, The Slave of ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... child wonder who can come all the way from Missoula to Broadway in one year and win a world's series game is of course entitled to much credit, but this boy certainly fell into a particularly soft spot. With the Macks' billion dollar infield killing base hits for him and the attack getting him eight runs, he would have had a hard time slipping the game to McGraw if he had sold out before hostilities started. Bush permitted the Giants, who were commonly reported to be ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... but there aren't many right men," said Upton. "I've no doubt there's somebody equal to the occasion somewhere, but with the population of the world at the present figures there's a billion chances to one she'll never meet him. What do you think of the financial situation, Walter? Pretty ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... road soon traverses the famous mineral belt of the Comstock Lode. This belt is 7,000 feet wide and 6 miles long, and produced nearly a billion dollars. The first mine to be seen is the Haywood, lying to the west side of the road. This mine produced over ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... find that electrons must be passing along in the circuit at a most amazing rate if there is to be any appreciable effect. When you turn on the 40-watt light at your desk you start them going through the filament of the lamp at the rate of about two and a half billion billion each second. You have stood on the sidewalk in the city and watched the people stream past you. Just suppose you could stand beside that narrow little sidewalk which the filament offers to the electrons and count them ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... very many Controllers on Earth, percentagewise. Of the three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand total of some thirty-five ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... they have been taken over to Brooklyn where the German army is, and they've got to raise a billion ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... country will not be satisfied with President Cleveland's platform—with his free trade primer. They believe in good wages for good work, and they know that this is the richest nation in the world. The Republic is worth at least sixty billion dollars. This vast sum is the result of labor, and this labor has been protected either directly or indirectly. This vast sum has been made by the farmer, the mechanic, the laborer, the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... within the range of his thought or imagination one tithe of the years, divine or human, which are included in this marvellous chronology. A billion years are but as a day ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... Hohenzollern, who ate up her two babies when she found they disturbed her gentleman friend, hovering over the scene like Schumann-Heink in the Rheingold,—I would not release that reel for less than a billion ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Writers make a solemn fuss; For the vermin 'n' the stenches Little ladies pity us; But the yearn that's honest dinkum, 'N' the prayer what ain't a sham Is that Fritz may bust 'n' sink 'em Ships of jam, jam, JAM! For we bolt 'em, chew 'em, drink 'em, Million billion bar'ls of beastly, ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson |
