"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... shall lend your fortune to the republic, and when liberty is established the republic will return your capital to you.—"I should like, then, following the example of the department of Herault, that the Convention should organize a civic loan of one billion, to be supplied by egoists and the indifferent.—Decree of May 20, "passed almost unanimously. A forced loan of one billion shall be ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... their work to the new conditions. With these expanding lines of British trade products, the values of stock, implements, and buildings made steady advance, and in 1901 the total value of all farm property in the province crossed the billion dollar mark. Since that year the annual increase in total farm values has been approximately forty million dollars. The following statement of total farm values in Ontario, as compiled by the Ontario bureau of Industries, ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... had virtually been slaves under Nicholas I, was greatly improved, and a proclamation was issued for the emancipation of the peasants, slaves not for a limited time only, but for life and from generation to generation. It cost the United States five years of fratricidal agony, a billion of dollars, and about half a million of lives, to liberate five or six millions of negroes; Russia, in one memorable day (February 19, 1861), liberated nearly twenty-two millions of muzhiks (peasants), and gave them full freedom, by a mere stroke of the pen of the "tsar osvobodityel," ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... 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 sundered, And a world on fire for a funeral pyre, While the stars ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... billion years of life and death Are but a moment or a breath To one unknown Immortal Force Who guides the planets in ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... said Fanny. "He can't fight. There's something the matter with his lungs, or something, and they're going to make him quit school. Besides, he's a billion times better than any of ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... view it. The engine took us along at about six knots, and every gentle wave that broke was a lamp of loveliness. The wake of the Morning Star was a milky path lit with trembling fragments of brilliancy, and below the surface, beside the rudder, was a strip of green light from which a billion sparks of fire shot to the air. Far behind, until the horizon closed upon the ocean, our wake was curiously remindful of the boulevard of a great city seen through a mist, the lights fading in the dim ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormous killing of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there are to- day alive on the planet a billion and three quarters of human beings. Our immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly fecund and very tough. Never before have there been so many people in the world. In the past centuries the world's population has been smaller; in the future centuries ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... he peered forth. "They've got the track lighted up all along the train, and there are about 'steen billion or so of ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... armistice, was an American squadron equipped with American planes. The Allies had looked to America for the production of combat planes in quantity and Congress, responding to popular enthusiasm, had in the first days of the war appropriated more than half a billion dollars for their manufacture. An Aircraft Production Board was organized, with Howard E. Coffin as chairman, although the actual manufacture of the machines was under the supervision of the Signal Corps. Promises were ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately two hundred thousand machines was worth two hundred and twenty-five millions. Behind them is a stalwart business representing, with parts and accessory makers, an investment of more than a billion and a quarter of dollars. Four hundred thousand men, or more than five times the strength of our standing army, depend upon it for a livelihood, and more than five millions of people are touched or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... 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 ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... "Suppose once in 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
... feet and went toward the door, slipping on his coat and cap. "I'm going to whistle for Baree," he said, and went out. The white world was brilliant under the glow of a full moon and a billion stars. It was the most wonderful night he had ever seen, and yet for a few moments he was as oblivious of its amazing beauty, its almost startling vividness, as though he ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... people lose three million years every twelve months by being sick. The doctor's fees amount to a billion and two hundred and twenty million. Wonder what the Master of Life meant when he said: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... 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
... know what I don't know, but I'll bet a million billion dollars there is something else besides just all this war stuff. I can't tell it, I just feel it. Anyhow, I'm to stay here with Aunty Boone till you come back. Girls can be trusted anywhere, but it may take the whole Army of the West, yet, to follow up and look after two little runty ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... halted or wavered. Forward on either side shot out the horns of armed men, clasping the camp in an embrace of steel. Then as these began to close, out burst the war cry of the Zulus, and with the roar of a torrent and the rush of a storm, with a sound like the humming of a billion bees, wave after wave the deep breast of the impi rolled down upon the white men. With it went the black-shielded Umcityu and with them went Nahoon, the son of Zomba. A bullet struck him in the side, glancing from his ribs, he did not heed; a white man fell from his horse before him, he ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... number one export is oil. Azerbaijan's oil production declined through 1997, but has registered an increase every year since. Negotiation of production-sharing arrangements (PSAs) with foreign firms, which have thus far committed $60 billion to long-term oilfield development, should generate the funds needed to spur future industrial development. Oil production under the first of these PSAs, with the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, began in November 1997. A consortium ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... hospitality, constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy. Religion, which ought to be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the same grade. You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?" The modern version would be, "How came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... something like a tether 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 electron ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... 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
... him above the cost of the production of the products of the soil which he sells, there is such an annual increment to the wealth of each country taken as a whole. Some experts have told me they calculated that, at the outside, in prosperous peace times the annual increment of German wealth is ten billion marks. ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... Coldriver Valley to reach a market, Scattergood's maps showed him there were probably a quarter of a million acres—mostly spruce. Estimating with rigid conservatism, this would run eight thousand feet to the acre, or twenty billion feet of timber—and this did not take into consideration hardwood. In Scattergood's secret heart he wanted it all. All he might not be able to get, but he must have more than half—and that ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... finding people? Could a billion and a half human beings die, all at once, without leaving a single isolated ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... This fluid mass comprises two billions two hundred and fifty millions of cubic miles, forming a spherical body of a diameter of sixty leagues, the weight of which would be three quintillions of tons. To comprehend the meaning of these figures, it is necessary to observe that a quintillion is to a billion as a billion is to unity; in other words, there are as many billions in a quintillion as there are units in a billion. This mass of fluid is equal to about the quantity of water which would be discharged by all the rivers of the earth ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... frazzle. But the man at the head of it all don't earn more than a thousand dollars a month ... Your nation's getting to worship Mammon, Dick. Cut it out. There's just the one difference in humanity—sense or no sense, and most likely you won't find any more sense in the man that makes a billion selling bonds than in his brother Tim that lives in a shack and sells corn-cobs. I'm not speaking out of sinful jealousy, for there was a day when I was reckoned a railroad king, and I quit with a bigger pile than kings usually retire on. But I haven't the ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... it was no use guessing. It looked like burned lime, or else the secretions of about a billion birds; and there were no birds ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... January, 1918, the French Parliament voted war credits amounting to twenty billions of dollars. Of this enormous fund only two billions have been borrowed from outside sources; all the remainder has been subscribed or paid for by taxation or by loans in France herself. More than a billion dollars has been loaned ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... pay us at the point of shipment about five millions dollars; whereas, if this same phosphate were applied to our own soils that already suffer for want of phosphorus, it would make possible the production of nearly a billion dollars' worth of corn above what these soils can ever produce without the addition of phosphorus. And our phosphate is only a part of the phosphate imported into Europe. They also produce rock phosphate from European mines, and great quantities of slag phosphate ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... 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 and ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... motion-picture theatres and exhibitions that are in operation in the United States at the present time, and which represent an investment of some $45,000,000. Licensees under Edison patents in this country alone produce upward of 60,000,000 feet of films annually, containing more than a billion and a half separate photographs. To what extent the motion-picture business may grow in the not remote future it is impossible to conjecture, for it has taken a place in the front ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... 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 ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... heaven was punctuated by a billion dots of steely white that looked like pin-pricks. All the light there was came from the fitful watch-fires, where even the wagons were being burned now that the meagre supply of rough timber was giving out. The rebels, ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... 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 ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... simple method of crossing oceans is adopted, it will of course mean the end of that fantastic medieval anachronism, the Navy. No need for billion-dollar aircraft carriers, battleships, drydocks and all the other cumbersome junk that keeps those boats and things afloat. Give the taxpayer back ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison
... brilliant stars of a billion lights are seen to fade and pass away, as they wander through the haze of gray. Out of the darkness of the night into the light ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... 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
... story ruled these out. First, there was a solid overcast at about 18,000 feet. No meteor cruises along straight and level below 18,000 feet. Second, on only rare occasions have meteors been seen traveling three in trail. The chances of seeing such a phenomenon are well over one in a billion. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... and responded violently. As there were sounds audible 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 ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, shut in by ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Hitchcock, when the war was over, after a day spent with President Wilson in 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 Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... acceleration fifteen hours ago, when we passed Neptune, and we have covered thirty billion miles—three hundred times as far as from the moon to the sun, but only one half of one per ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... to destroy all the work we have put into him. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that would mean, in human terms, that he would be insane—and therefore worthless. As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. The information we have given him, plus the deductions and computations he has made from that information, is worth...." He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? How can a price ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the Ghost of the 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
... last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States—I see by the papers—has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Harriot was in admiration of my 'lion-port;' and, to do her justice, she conducted herself with great coolness upon the occasion; but then it may be observed, that it was I who was to stand fire, and not she. I thought of poor Lawless a billion of times, at least, as we were going to the ground; and I had my presentiments, and my confused notions of poetic justice: but poetic justice, and all other sorts of justice, went clear out of my head, when I saw my antagonist ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... add that there are a billion people in these two-thirds. But that figure is so big as only to stagger the mind in an attempt to take it in. The important thing is to see that it doesn't by its sheer bigness, stagger our faith or ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... and persuasive pleas - I tire, I tire of these; But I, the Maker of a billion suns, Ask men to stop the blasphemy of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... pine-cone, a prey to anything that might find him. He had 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
... whole situation. A miser does not scrutinize his treasure more acutely than we horticulturists do when getting out scions that have been stored during the winter and the voice of Demeter is calling us to the side of our own wards. How sadly a million nurserymen have thrown away a billion started scions of valuable kinds. My two chestnut scions had gone far beyond the hopeless stage but now perhaps I could be a doctor to them. If my two canary birds could be made to sing ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... God, the room seemed full of Him. But that's a small room. The church is a million and a billion times as big, isn't it, ma'am? But when the minister prayed, that big church seemed just as full as it could hold. Then, all of a sudden, they burst out a-singing. Father showed me the card with large letters on it, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... 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 ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... solve that sort of trouble? No, a billion dollars will only make the difficulty one billion dollars worse. The purpose of the billion is simply to continue the present methods of railroad management, and it is because of the present methods that we have any railroad ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was everywhere—among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... its relation to sea power than the revolution in armaments during the 19th century was the extraordinary growth of ocean commerce. The total value of the world's import and export trade in 1800 amounted in round numbers to 1-1/2 billion dollars, in 1850 to 4 billion, and in 1900 to nearly 24 billion. In other words, during a period in which the population of the world was not more than tripled, its international exchange of commodities was increased 16-fold. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... administration half the members were to be Americans and half Japanese. If these terms were accepted, Japan would relinquish all claim to further immigration of Japanese to the other States of the Union. The United States was to pay Japan a war-indemnity of two billion dollars, in installments, exclusive of the sums previously levied in the Pacific States. San Francisco was to be Japan's naval port on the Pacific coast, and the navy-yard and arsenals located there were to pass into the hands of the Japanese. The Philippines, Hawaii ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... are two billion rounds," Antonov told him. "I will give you an order." He felt in his pockets. "Has any one a ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... the odors that drifted in the air set the dogs gathering upon their haunches beyond the waiting circle of masters, their lips dripping, their fangs snapping in an eagerness that was not for the flesh of battle. And above it all there gleamed down a billion stars from out of the skies, the aurora flung its banners through the pale night, and softly the smoke rose straight up and then floated into the North, carried there by the gentle breath that spring was luring ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... tell? All I know is the Sub-treasury has bought over two billion dollars' worth of gold bullion in the last four months... and what can we do in ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... miles in length and three hundred in breadth, many parts of which are exceedingly fertile, and capable of sustaining a large population. As a colony, however, Algeria has not been a profitable investment. It took eighteen years to subdue it, at a cost of one billion francs, and the annual expense of maintaining it exceeds one hundred million francs. The condition of colonists there has generally been miserable; and while the imports in 1845 were one hundred million ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... all set to pack out in the morning when it happened. Maybe you read about the thing at the time. It got a light-hearted play in the papers, the way those things do. "A one in a billion accident," ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart
... taxed at a progressive rate, and the demagogues are already complaining that the rate is not high enough. The inheritance of his family, "hoarded by his self-denial," protected by the State until within a few years, now pays taxes which amount to the interest on a billion of dollars. We are assured by a railroad officer that three measures of legislation have increased the expenses of his corporation alone by a sum equal to the interest on $32,000,000, with no appreciable benefit to the public. The ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... from either of you. Not a whisper, ye grinning rascals! Cuddle down, little people of Christ's heart and leading. Snuggle close—closer yet, my children—that your arms may grow used to this loving. Another kiss from mother? Blessed Ones! A billion more, for nights and mornings, for all day long of all the years, waiting here on mother's lips. And now to sleep. Christmas is to-morrow. Hush! To-morrow. Yes; to-morrow. Go t' sleep! Go t' sleep!" And upon the flying heels of Night—but still ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... minority which had for half a century before over-ridden the whole nation. It was the Tammany minority which ruled the Democracy. It is the minority of syndicates, corporations, and vested interests which crowned itself in our Billion Congress, and is spreading itself in our legislatures. Are the very occurrences, of which so much has been made exhibitions, of the tyranny of all the people; or, are they not rather, with one exception, instances where a graceless minority has resolved either slyly or boldly to ignore the people? ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... "My life as a causal system of physical and psychological processes, which lies spread out in time between the dates of my birth and of my death, will come to an end with my last breath; to continue it, to make it go on till the earth falls into the sun, or a billion times longer, would be without any value, as that kind of life which is nothing but the mechanical occurrence of physiological and psychological phenomena had as such no ultimate value for me or for you, or for anyone, at any time. But my real life, as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... 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
... answered. "I should say that weather warnings issued by the Bureau save half a billion dollars to the country every year and prevent the loss of hundreds of lives. All those are short-range predictions. Very few of them cover much more than a week in advance, except, perhaps, a West Indian Hurricane which has been reported from the Antilles, or a flood on the Mississippi ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... diamond sun arose, and tossed A billion gems across the sea. "The Slave of God is lost, is lost, The Slave of God is ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... 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 ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... miles.] In 1913 the loss in a single year was one hundred and sixty million dollars. [Footnote: One hundred and sixty-three million, U. S. Weather Bureau estimate.] In the last thirty years it is estimated the loss has been a half of a billion, and it would have been immensely greater, of course, if the river had not been given unchallenged freedom of great, unclaimed swamps. And yet the river has never at any one time massed its great army of waters. At one time it has been the Ohio, at another the Missouri, and then the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... half billion eggs and small fish were distributed last year, if I remember rightly," was the reply. "Of course, a large proportion of these fish did not reach maturity, but perhaps half a billion did so, and half a billion fish is an immense contribution to the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Vaneman, we had probably attained a velocity of something like seven billion four hundred thirteen million miles per second, and that is the approximate speed at which we are now traveling. We must be nearly six quadrillion miles, and that is a space of several hundred light-years—away from our solar system, or, more plainly, about six times as far away from our ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... Isaac on a stone. Isaac was very dear to him; but God, in incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer. It may be that Abraham feared the Lord. But whether that be true or not it has since been determined by a few billion people that he loved the Lord and ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... said. "We've been paratiming for the past ten thousand years. When the Ghaldron-Hesthor trans-temporal field was discovered, our ancestors had pretty well exhausted the resources of this planet. We had a world population of half a billion, and it was all they could do to keep alive. After we began paratime transposition, our population climbed to ten billion, and there it stayed for the last eight thousand years. Just enough of us to enjoy our planet and the ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... 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
... his native right, and takes out an injunction against the city that wishes to trespass upon his property. This antagonism manifests itself in the laws that safeguard the small shopkeeper against the big firm, and the small manufacturer against any company with its billion dollars of capital. This antagonism to the sin of trespass has lent a peculiar sanctity to treaties between Canada and the United States. We have one hundred millions of people, and Canada nine millions. We need many things that ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... I speak for the world. The rich people get the rich presents, and the poor people get the poor ones. That may not be the fault of Father Christmas; he may be under contract for a billion years to deliver all presents just as they are addressed; but how can he go on smiling? He must long to alter all that. There is Miss Priscilla A—— who gets five guineas worth of the best every year from Mr. Cyril B—— who hopes to be her heir. Mustn't that make Father ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... still better off. Dr. Kane calculates the rain which falls on Ireland in a year at over 100 billion cubic yards; and of this he supposes two-thirds to pass off in evaporation, leaving one-third, equal to nearly a million and a half of horse-power, to reach the sea. His calculations of the water-power of the Shannon and other ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo away ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to bring, by their fate, great good or great evil to the free world's future. From the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the South Pacific one third of all mankind has entered upon an historic struggle for a new freedom; freedom from grinding poverty. Across all continents, nearly a billion people seek, sometimes almost in desperation, for the skills and knowledge and assistance by which they may satisfy from their own resources, the material wants ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... is said to be covered with peat, and small bogs abound in the drift-covered area of New England and the states lying as far west as the Missouri River. In Massachusetts alone it has been reckoned that there are fifteen billion cubic feet of peat, the largest ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small country: it contains only 50,000 square miles, whereas the United States, as every one knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow passenger on the train, together with a provisional estimate of the American corn crop for 1922: but he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 rake an' ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... conveniences. Furnaces and steam plants took heating below stairs; electricity replaced candles, lamps, and gas fixtures; and the old cook stove gave way to modern ranges of various sorts. The safer and easier the devices, the more human vigilance relaxed. Today, of our half billion dollar fire loss annually, one-fifth of it occurs in the country, and over sixty per cent of residential fires start in ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... 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
... the profits of the retailer, the Rochdale system has grown until the wholesale cooperative societies of England and Scotland are probably the largest general merchandising corporations in the world, doing a business of approximately a billion dollars a year. ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... the things which God created. Without the steely gray flash of those mystery-lights over the Arctic pole Jan would have been homesick; his soul would have withered and died in anything but this wondrous land which he knew, with its billion dazzling stars by night and its eye-blinding brilliancy by day. For Jan, in a way, was fortunate. He had in him an infinitesimal measure of the Cree, which made him understand what the winds sometimes whispered in the pine-tops; and a ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... the first six months they reported on schedule, remember? A fine clean planet, no dominant life-forms, perfect for immigration; unique, one world in a billion. Abruptly they stopped sending. ...
— Competition • James Causey
... the essence of one's Being, cannot be thus changed at will. But come, suppose that I had the power of passing through solid things, so that I could penetrate my subjects, one after another, even to the number of a billion, verifying the size and distance of each by the sense of FEELING: how much time and energy would be wasted in this clumsy and inaccurate method! Whereas now, in one moment of audition, I take as it were ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... ever since that hour we both saw—thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab—his ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... great Meru, she remained motionless like a stone, suspending her life-breath. Thence going to the top of Himavat, where the gods had performed their sacrifice (in days of yore), that amiable and auspicious girl remained for a billion of years standing on the toe only of her feet. Wending then to Pushkara, and Gokarna, and Naimisha, and Malaya, she emaciated her body, practising austerities agreeable to her heart. Without acknowledging any other god, with steady ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... lookin' long-legged feller what wuz new to the place, stretch out your right hand to him, an' say: 'Welcome to Heaven Long Jim Hart. Come right in an' make yourself to home, 'cause you're goin' to live with us a million an' a billion years, an' all the rest uv the time thar is. Your fishin' pole is down thar by the bank. I've been savin' it fur you. Henry is 'bout a mile farther up the stream pullin' in a whale two hundred feet long that he's had his ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not surprised to hear that they are still interested in finding me. But I should warn you that there is very little remaining of the three-billion, seventeen-million credits that I ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... Armenia 1.012 billion kWh; note - exports an unknown quantity to Georgia; includes exports to Nagorno-Karabakh region ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... for a so-called American to be in!" said the head Secret Service man to Brown and Martell sternly. "I wouldn't be in your shoes for a billion dollars." ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... one could tell her pictures mid a billion, So daubed were they with ochre blots and splashes of vermilion; She claimed to be a connoisseur of objets d'art and curios, But what attracted notice was her openwork and lury hose, Fashioned in every colour from magenta down to cinnabar, Suggestive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... said, "All this is on the academic side. We checked your background thoroughly before approaching you, Mathers. We know your record, even before you entered the Space Service. Just between the three of us, wouldn't you like out? There are a full billion men and women in our armed forces, you can be spared. Let's say you've already done your share. Can't you see the potentialities in spending the rest of your life with the Galactic Medal ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... saloon keeper up the canyon has got a billion bottles of booze. Worst whiskey you ever smelled. He says he's laying for you and if you cross his doorstep, ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... bring 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 to ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... they had been exceedingly happy; and there was something so frank and touching in the way in which the kind creature flung her all into his lap, saluting him with a hearty embrace at the same time, and wishing that it were a thousand billion billion times more, so that her darling Howard might enjoy it, that the man would have been a ruffian indeed could he have found it in his heart to be angry with her; and so he kissed her in return, and patted her on the shining ringlets, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... immensely pleased by the editor's acknowledgment, "the war won't be over until the armies of William the Vile, the Prussian Outcast Emperor, are licked to a frazzle—and that's going to take five million of our men, a hundred billion of our dollars, and a damned sight longer than any year, or two years, or three years; you can bet ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... broke out there were about four million French families who owned their homes and a thriftier and more industrious people could hardly be found. In 1871, when the heartless Bismarck insisted on having a one billion dollar indemnity, besides the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, he thought he had the people of France throttled for a generation, but to his very great amazement every dollar of this huge sum was paid in less than three ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... pay duties in silver or in certificates for silver deposits will, when they are issued in sufficient amount to circulate, put an end to the receipt of revenue in gold, and thus compel the payment of silver for both the principal and interest of the public debt. One billion one hundred and forty-three million four hundred and ninety-three thousand four hundred dollars of the bonded debt now outstanding was issued prior to February, 1873, when the silver dollar was unknown ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... millions for the only deflagrator that can provoke its explosion! Why, all the wealth of the world wouldn't suffice to purchase the secret of my engine, and rather than sell it at such a price I would cut my tongue in half with my teeth. Ten millions, when it is worth a billion—a billion—a billion!" ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... invented the telephone—that is, he made it work perfectly and brought it to the greatest commercial value, so that a billion men, women and children are using it in nearly all the languages and dialects in the civilized world. But he was very careful to give Dr. Alexander Graham Bell credit for his original work ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... sixty-nine yards broad, and fifty-one feet high, being aground in sixty-one fathoms. Its appearance was like that of the back of the Isle of Wight, and the cliffs resembled those of the chalk range to the west of Dover. The weight of this mass was calculated to amount to one billion two hundred and ninety two millions three hundred and ninety seven thousand six hundred ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... Loan from England"—That is the heading under which were grouped the nine lectures given by Miss Helen Fraser at Vassar College. England has borrowed a billion or so of dollars from us, but the obligation is not all her way. The moral strength of our cause is immeasurably increased by her alliance, and the spectacle of a great democracy organizing itself for complete unity in a world crisis is worth an incalculable amount to us. Such ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... distribution of its circulation. Between 1870 and 1890 the number of newspapers published and the aggregate circulation increased almost exactly threefold—about five times as fast as the population was growing. In the latter year the entire circulation for the country was over four and a half billion copies, of which about sixty per cent. were dailies. So great had been the growth of the press during the seventies that the census authorities in 1880 made a careful study of the statistical aspects ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... fierceness of the conflict. Personal ambition, trade rivalries, the greed of munition-makers, race hatreds and revenge—all played a part in the awful tragedy. Thirty millions of human lives were sacrificed; three hundred billion dollars' worth of property was destroyed; more than two hundred billion dollars of indebtedness was added to the burden that the world was already carrying. The paper currency of the nations was swollen from seven billions ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Across the universe, two billion years ago, there too a planet coalesced from the mutually attracted vortices of twisted space; gases compelled by gravitational forces solidifying to hardened matter, forming a crust over a molten core. In the soupy atmosphere of metallic salts ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... contained six Norcross-Brail engines, each capable of developing 1,150 H.P. The engines were in charge of Auchincloss and two assistant engineers, who had all six engines filling the room with a drowsy drone, like ten billion bees humming themselves to sleep in ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... brave man does not CREATE his bravery. He is entitled to no personal credit for possessing it. It is born to him. A baby born with a billion dollars—where is the personal merit in that? A baby born with nothing—where is the personal demerit in that? The one is fawned upon, admired, worshiped, by sycophants, the other is neglected and despised—where ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and the Geary Law. Immigration Restriction. Thomas B. Reed Institutes Parliamentary Innovations in the House of Representatives. Counting a Quorum. The "Force Bill" in Congress. Resentment of the South. Defeated in Senate. The "Billion Dollar Congress" and the Dependent Pensions Act. Pension Payments. The McKinley Tariff Act and "Blaine" Reciprocity. International Copyright Act Becomes a Law. Mr. Blaine as Secretary of State. Murder by "Mafia" Italians Causes Riot in New Orleans. The Itata at San Diego, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... substances more complex even than those already known to or analysable by organic chemistry; and if these complex molecules likewise possess the adhesive faculty, a grouping of millions or even billions of atoms may ultimately be formed. (A billion, that is a million millions, of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... last Passenger Pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. Population estimates ranged up to 5 billion, comprising 40% of the total number of birds in North America in the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... hardly a billion miles inside the Rim, and Mason offered no resistance when he felt their magnetics touch the Scout and draw it gently to the flank of their great ship. It was necessary to scale down the scanner's field to see the huge shape in its entirety. ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... the degree of suffering experienced and the length of time it endures, the shortest term being ten million years. A good life secures an elevated and happy life on earth, or as a blessed spirit in one of the many heavens, where existence is continued for a bagatelle of ten billion years. When the karma ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... the time a matter-duplicator receiver misread OCH{3}CH{3}OH, to turn out a magnificently busted blonde sphygmomano-raiser with an HOCH{3}OH replacement, putting a strain on the loyalty of a billion teen-age girls dedicated to Doyle Oglevie worship. Doyle-she insisted she was Doyle-he, as it took quite a while for her hormones to overcome the memory of his easy, eyelash-flapping, tone-torturing microphone conquests. Put a strain on ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... dollars to keep 'em going, y'understand, not to mention such chicken-feed like three million dollars for this here Soldiers' Relations Bureau and the like, it leaves the country practically broke with seven or eight billion dollars in the bank. Now do you understand what I am ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... 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 ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... we; Here and there gleam other fires,— Burning ships on a shoreless sea; Now and again a flame expires, One last, quivering shaft of light, Shot through a billion ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... How silly to try to be wiser 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 of heaven ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Van Billion's musicale tonight?' inquired the older of the two, a tall and striking demi-brunette, turning to ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Nothing in Blodgett and Blatherwick's notes about Estelle. "A whole directory of names," as Judge Blodgett had said, but no Estelle. The world full of useless people—a billion and a half of them—and not an Estelle at poor Amidon's call in this time of need. Hence this ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... perfect vine and puts it in t'e cask of fresh grape juice, and soon t'e vine drinkers of t'e vorld svear it is t'e rare old vintage. T'e bacillus, inconceivably tiny, svarming vit' life, reproducing itself a billion from one, t'at is Nature's tool. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark |
