"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glory. Sometimes I can't sleep—I get so full of worship. I was reading the other day that it would take a fast train forty million years to get to the nearest fixed star. Isn't that awful? And think of it, when you got there, a billion times more would lie beyond—so much more that you wouldn't even then have touched the fringe of the wonderful scheme. It is too big for the mind of man to grasp, and so is the other, the realm of spirit, which is, after all, the main thing—in ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... 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? ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... learning the case for ratification of the Versailles Treaty: "Through the Treaty, we will yet get very much of importance.... In violation of all international law and treaties we have made disposition of a billion dollars of German-owned properly here. The Treaty validates all that."[77] The European Allies secured very similar advantages from inducing China to enter the war ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... friend!" he commanded, huskily. "It's all right. You'll make good. I know that. And there's a chance in a billion that you'll come back to us. I'm—I'm not deserting you. And I guess there's precious little danger that any one on The Place will ever forget you. It's—it's all right. Millions of humans are doing it. I'd give everything ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal—a geographical purist might have added Luxembourg, Andorra and Monaco—remained untouched upon the Continent. Into this insignificant territory and the British Isles were packed all that was left of the world's two billion people: a blinded, starving mob, driven mad by terror. How many there were there, squirming, struggling, dying in a desperate unwillingness to give up existence, no matter how intolerable, no one could calculate; any more ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... 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 until the total granite is ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... her gravely. "After the Lord printed one volume, he destroyed the plates. Mr. Parker, sir—" He stepped up to John Parker and smote the latter lightly on the breast—"Tag; you're it!" he announced pleasantly. "I'll cancel this contract when you hand me a certified check; for twenty-four billion, nine-hundred and eighty-two million, four hundred and seventeen thousand, six hundred and one dollars, nine cents, and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the 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 $1,000,000 and is ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... average considerably more than one million tons. If this were all made up into the refreshing drink we get at our breakfast tables, there would be enough to supply every inhabitant of the earth with some sixty cups a year, representing a total of more than ninety billion cups. In terms of pounds the annual world output amounts to about two and a quarter billions—an amount so large that if it were done up in the familiar one-pound paper packages; and if these packages were laid end to end in a row; they would ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers. Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples for his telescopes. Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they had formerly believed ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... 38,000,000,000 hectares. This liquid mass totals 2,250,000,000 cubic miles and could form a sphere with a diameter of sixty leagues, whose weight would be three quintillion metric tons. To appreciate such a number, we should remember that a quintillion is to a billion what a billion is to one, in other words, there are as many billions in a quintillion as ones in a billion! Now then, this liquid mass nearly equals the total amount of water that has poured through all the earth's rivers ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... 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
... been chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine. (For three years France had to endure the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... interruption, for three 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
... have filled our little planet till it tends to running o'er, Will this world, with souls o'erladen, be a Hades or an Aidenn? Will man, woman, boy and maiden, be less civilised, or more? That's the question, RAVENSTEIN! What boots a billion, less or more, If Man still is fool ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... the destruction of French coal mines at Lens. Germany's got to give back ton for ton the shipping sunk by her submarines. She must yield up all her aircraft, and can keep an army of only one hundred thousand men. Then, too, she'll have to fork over a little trifle of forty or fifty billion dollars, an amount that will keep her nose to the grindstone for the next thirty years. Oh, yes, Germany will pay ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering something intently. "Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometers? It would take a billion years ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... had not been the dreadful detonations of thermo-nuclear bombs that had poisoned his paradise—though, of course, they had helped. It had been the constant spillage of atomic waste into the upper atmosphere that had spelled ruin. Now, where four billion people had once lived in war and want, forty million lived in poisoned plenty. He was chancellor of a planet whose ruling species could not longer ...
— It's All Yours • Sam Merwin
... got enny kind ov show Tew talk ov chast'ning trials; When thet thar thunder cloud lets down It's sixty billion vials; No! when it looks tew rain on hay, First take yer ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... at the present time all of the combined capital of the world is held in the hands of a mighty ring of magnates. The civilized world's billion of people slave for the benefit of a few thousands, who have usurped the prerogatives and the rights of the whole. Nowhere is this condition more aggravated than in this country. We were all born freemen and we find ourselves to-day at the mercy of a few thousand ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... new party did when they got in was to start up the Bureau of Printin' 'nd Engravin' and roll off a few billion dollars of gover'ment money. In Guadalquique the money for all parties was the same, except each party used to rubber-stamp its name across the face. An old navy yeoman hit the beach there one time named Tommie Anderson and he was made chief of the Bureau o' Printin' ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... true. As they moved through the ship it was like walking in the treasure house of a Neptunian robber baron. "There's well over a billion in here," Nicko marveled. "Whatever you say about ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... third form of that energy of which we have already treated two manifestations—heat and electricity. The distinguishing characteristic of ether light-waves is their extreme rapidity of vibration, which has been calculated to range from 700 billion movements per second for violet rays to ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... the war much sooner to a close, thus saving a monthly expenditure, far exceeding the whole appropriation. But this vast increase of the wealth of Missouri, caused by her becoming a free State, if far less than one billion of dollars, would, by increasing her contribution to the national revenue, in augmented payments of duties and internal taxes, diminish to that extent the rate of taxation to be paid ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... issues were two—first, the land, which the peasants wanted to take from the landlords; and second, the foreign debt. The Russian Tsar had borrowed four billion dollars from France and a billion or two from England, to be used in enslaving the Russian workers and driving several millions of them to death on the battlefield. Now should the Russian workers consider themselves bound by this debt? ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... the news. 11. Sabbath observation was then very strict. 12. They expect that she wrote the letter. 13. The invention of electricity has revolutionized all manufactures. 14. Who learned her to sing? 15. Edison discovered the phonograph. 16. One cannot comprehend the enormity of a billion of dollars. 17. Many complements were paid to her beauty. 18. His consciousness pricked him. 19. How could any one be guilty of such a cruel action. 20. The advancement of ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... Steve had 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 Valhalla, ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... Professor, are more interested in low frequency rays, the long ones down below infra-red," continued Cor. "You have seen our development of the heat-dynamo principle. It utilizes, I might add, not only solar radiation but that of the stars as well. There being a billion and a half of these in the universe, many of them a thousand times or more as large as your own sun, we naturally have quite an efficient little heating plant here. It provides us with our weapon of warfare, as well as keeping us warm. Permit ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the 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 ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... a paltry twenty billion dollars a year were spent on Xmas—sorry, sir—on Christmas Gratuities, back before my Bureau came on the scene to triple that figure, to bring us ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... it back! The devil! It wasn't intended for any mortal man to marry you—Sally Ruth, I wouldn't marry you now for forty billion dollars and a mule! Turn loose, you hussy! Turn ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... the present age of the earth to be about two billion years, basing their conclusions on a study of lead pockets left as a result of radioactivity in rocks. The Hindu scriptures declare that an earth such as ours is dissolved for one of two reasons: the inhabitants ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... ball unwinding from a pole. The energies achieved would have seemed fantastic to earlier scientists. The Bevatron, a modern offspring of the first cyclotron, accelerates protons to 99.13% the speed of light, thereby giving them 6.2 billion ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... the sudden racket I stood excruciated, with shivering knees and flinching heart, God knows: for not less terrifically uproarious than the clatter of the last Trump it raged and raged, and I thought that all the billion dead could not fail to start, and rise, at alarum so excessive, and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... 1868, having been gone a little over two years. He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald |
