"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know, and 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
... 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 ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... reality which at any time has entered into the history of this planet and that of its brothers and sisters was in that vast flowing, swirling, revolving globe of gases which is known to have been at one time at least five billion miles in diameter, or fifteen ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... miserable in many ways, but in the Kansas homes in that memorable grasshopper year of 1874 life was wretchedly uncomfortable. Out of doors the cloud was a disaster. Nor flood, nor raging wind nor prairie fire, nor unbroken drouth could claim greater measure of havoc in its wake than this billion-footed, billion-winged creature, an appetite grown measureless, a hunger vitalized, and individualized, and endowed with power of motion. No living shred of grass, or weed, or stalk of corn, or straw of stubble or tiniest garden growth; no leaf or bit of tender bark of tree, or shrub, ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... patient. If half a grain of a certain drug is the normal dose for an adult, the proper dose of the same drug for a small infant, say, less than a year old, may be about one twenty-fifth of the adult dose. How small, in proportion, should then be the dose given to a cell a billion times ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this offense. Go! Work your will ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Edison really 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 on ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... 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
... it is impossible to say exactly how large it is. A 2000 study estimated a total of 7.1 million unique Web sites, which at the Web's historical rate of growth, would have increased to 11 million unique sites as of September 2001. Estimates of the total number of Web pages vary, but a figure of 2 billion is a reasonable estimate of the number of Web pages that can be reached, in theory, by standard search engines. We need not make a specific finding as to a figure, for by any measure the Web is extremely ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... 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
... market involves no less of care and knowledge. The quality of the Cuban berry is of the best. It is the misfortune of the people of the United States that very few of them really know anything about coffee and its qualities, notwithstanding the fact that they consume about a billion pounds a year, all except a small percentage of it being coffee of really inferior quality. But coffee, like cigars, pickles, or music, is largely a matter ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... another to 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
... 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 rank of rapidly ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... much extravagance in the claim as a cursory glance at the figures would indicate. Europe alone loses between eighteen, and twenty million, as estimated by the most skillful statisticians. Since the time of the legendary Trojan War (three thousand years), it is supposed by good authority that one billion two hundred thousand of human, beings have lost their lives by the hazard of war, not all in actual battle alone, but by wounds and diseases incident to a soldier's life, in addition to those fallen upon ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... it ever comes to the earth is fifty-seven millions of miles, while, as I told you, Mars is now but thirty-five millions of miles away, a difference in favor of Mars of twenty-two millions of miles, quite a distance when one has to travel it. Neptune, the farthest of the major planets, is two billion eight hundred millions of miles from the sun, and it is ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... 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
... myself 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
... years to ripen vine and make it perfect. Science finds t'e bacillus of t'e 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
... seems turned into a delirium. Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or is it poverty? The world seems filled with money ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... thousand burn gas. This single instance is representative of gas-lighting which initiated the "light age" and nursed it through the vicissitudes of youth. The consumption of gas has grown in the United States during this time to three billion cubic feet per day. For strictly illuminating purposes in 1910 nearly one hundred billion cubic feet were used. This country has been blessed with large supplies of natural gas; but as this fails new oil-fields ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... 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
... Hall Porter taps at the door: "Number Five hundred billion and twenty-eight, your boatman ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Twenty a month for daring Death—for fighting from dawn to dark— Twenty and grub and a place to sleep in God's great public park; We roofless go, with the cook's bateau to follow our hungry crew— A billion of spruce and hell turned loose when ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... 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 agricultural ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... than uranium. Since the amount of transformation occurring in radium in a year amounts to from 1-2000 to 1-10,000 of the total amount, the time required for the complete transformation of an atom of uranium would be somewhere between two billion and ten billion years—figures quite beyond the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 francs, the exports were only about ten millions. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... just love me for my two billion dollars," the imp retorted, and winked at her. As did Nick, Cletus could plainly see the twist operated on the MVD payroll as well as in ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... must conceive it as essentially thus unrelated, so that even were a billion men to sport the same opinion, and only one man to differ, we could admit no collateral circumstances which might presumptively make it more probable that he, not they, should be wrong. Truth, they say, follows not the counting of noses, nor is it only another name for a majority vote. It is ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... institution. The usual argument began with ridicule of Thomas Jefferson's famous statement that all men are born equal. The second argument was an economic one, based on the value of the slaves. Three million slaves would average a value of five hundred dollars each, and this meant a billion five hundred millions of property, that had to be considered as so much property in ships, factories, engines, reapers, pastures, meadows, herds and flocks. All planters invoked the words of Moses, permitting the Hebrews to hold slaves, and therefore exhibiting slavery ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... spirits, and with a safe conscience. 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
... elsewhere. Mr Bonar Law, in a recent interview in the Observer, stated that we had sent back to the United States practically the whole of our holdings of American securities to be sold or pledged as collateral for loans, and that the value of them was three billion dollars—L600 millions sterling. Any of them that have only been pledged can presumably be used to meet the loans raised as they fall due, and so will lighten our burden in the matter of repayment. These loans raised abroad are the second mode of foreign financing. By it we had raised up to November ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... non-existent: for the Voice, being 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 the census and statistics, local, corporeal, mental and spiritual, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... 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 to keep warmth a little longer in its decrepit bones. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... minority which rushed the South into secession. It was that same 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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... there can be no doubt that with the vastly greater natural advantages of the South, the superiority of free to slave labor, the immense immigration, especially from Europe to the South, aided by the Homestead Bill, and the conversion of large plantations into small farms, an addition of at least one billion of dollars would be made in a decade, by the exclusion of slavery, to the value of the products ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... but the effect 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 region on ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... year in itself, what then? That seems a stupendous time, but it is nothing compared with the time needed to form a nebula into a planetary system. If we had five thousand of such years, with every second in them a year, we should then only have counted one billion real years, and billions must have passed since the sun was a gaseous nebula filling the outermost ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... a century, in fact, since King George came to Greece, there are hundreds of thousands of the best Greek patriots that have been killed, slain, or assassinated, and nearly a billion drachmas national debt, hanging upon the neck of every Greek, like the Damoclean sword, but there is no deliverance for the Cretans, and there is no salvation for the Macedonians, instead there are the traps strategically placed across the ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... "war boom." Gradually it has spread, bringing such enormous profits in all our lines of business supplying the needs of the "Great War," that the first twelve months of it showed more than a billion dollars trade balance in our favor, and that balance then began increasing on a progressive scale. Money is yet plentiful. All business is stimulated. Our crops are unexampled in quantity and money value. Everything points to great ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... 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 pounds ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... using 100,000 tons of other nitrogen salts. By this means her old, wornout fields were made to yield greater harvests than our fresh land. Germany and England were like two duelists buying powder at the same shop. The Chilean Government, pocketing an export duty that aggregated half a billion dollars, permitted the saltpeter to be shoveled impartially into British and German ships, and so two nitrogen atoms, torn from their Pacific home and parted, like Evangeline and Gabriel, by transportation oversea, ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... shall be the legitimate offspring of the mother, legally entitled to bear her name and inherit her estates. That fits precisely Nora's case. Her son is legitimate. If she had in her own right an estate worth a billion, that child would be her heir-at-law. She had nothing but her good name! Her son has a right to inherit that—unspotted, Hannah! mind, unspotted! Your proper way will be to proceed against Herman Brudenell for bigamy, call me for a witness, establish the fact of Nora's marriage, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... 'em; I quit that sanchooary for d' Mefodis.' D' Presbyter'an is a heap too gloomy a religion for a niggah, sah. Dey lams loose at me wid foreord'nation an' preedest'nation, an' how d' bad place is paved wid chil'ens skulls, an' how so many is called, an' only one in a billion beats d' gate; an' fin'lly, las' Sunday, B'rer Peters, he's d' preacher, he ups an' p'ints at me in speshul an' says he sees in a dream how I'm b'ar-hung an' breeze-shaken over hell; an', sah, he simply ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... 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
... talent of silver is, as estimated, about L390, or $1950, it would seem that the silver accumulated by David would have amounted to nearly two billion dollars, and the gold to a like sum,—altogether four billions, which is plainly impossible. Probably there is a mistake in the figures. We read in the twenty-ninth chapter of Chronicles that David gave ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... Jimmie as he peered forth. "They've got the track lighted up all along the train, and there are about 'steen billion or so of soldiers patrolling the ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... bed rock was scraped yielded nearly ten thousand dollars, and one claim which was supposed to have been worked out, and was abandoned, was again taken up by two men who obtained forty thousand dollars from it in two weeks. Up to the present time it is estimated that very nearly two billion dollars' worth of gold have been ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Billion Blignaut Bisseux Delporte Du prez Du Toit De la Bey Durand Davel De Langue Duvenage Fourie Fouche Grove Hugo Jourdan Lombard Le Roux Roux Lagrange Labuscaque Mare Marais Malan Malraison Maynard Malherbe De Meillon De Marillac Matthee Naude Nortier Rousseau ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... lies in its shadow and is held in its paw. Even now is the Sphinx weaving on the web of my destiny. I hope I may be spared the cumbersome burden of the wealth of a Rockefeller, who is said to possess a billion dollars for every hair on his head. One thousandth part of his wealth would ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... lost in the destruction of property about two billion dollars and in prosecuting the war two billion more. No people can lose so much without seriously disarranging the entire mechanism of their government. It is for this reason, therefore, that the measure of "National Aid to Education" has so many and so persistent ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... in the first round the rest being byes—we arrive at the result that there were 268,435,457 teams or 1,073,741,828 men playing. Might not just a small percentage of these, if brought over to France, decide the issue at once in favour of the Allies? Some of the four or five billion ponies might also be utilised for remounts and for transport. Nor should the committee which successfully managed this tournament be lost sight of. They showed a power of organisation which could scarcely fail to be of use now at the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia's sun. To those who know where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and three fellows that seem in a cluster with it—though they are incredible billions of miles nearer—make ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... I sent that letter off secret. I wouldn't let Miss Katherine know for a billion dollars that I'd sent it, but I'm glad I did. I'm sure she's got something in her heart she don't talk about, for last night, when she didn't know I was looking, I saw that same quiet proudness come in her face I saw the ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... 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
... 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 ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... 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
... share in 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
... controlling hand. He had a daily report from every mill, which in a few lines told just what the concern was doing. There was also a daily report from each branch office, and a report from the head cashier, where one line of figures presaged the financial weather. When "the billion-dollar trust"—the United States Steel Corporation—was formed, Mr. Carnegie sold his interests in the Carnegie plants to the new concern for two hundred fifty million dollars, and took ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... were over, when he had had a shave and a shine, and washed his hands, and looked into a department-store window that contained ten billion yards of silk draped against polished satinwood, when he had felt unhappy over a movie theater large enough to contain ten times the population of Schoenstrom, and been cursed by a policeman for jaywalking, and had passed a hotel ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... 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 ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... things are explained in some other volume than the one which fell to me. Possibly they are inexplicable. We can dogmatize about a star a billion miles away, but we cannot say with certainty how an idea came to a man or a song to a bird. Indeed, I think, perhaps, it would have been wiser of me to have left the chiff-chaff out of it altogether. I have an uneasy feeling that ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... to that fair god whom the Carian water-nymph loved not wisely but too well. For, albeit the children of an ancient union, they marry not, nor are given in marriage, yet withal multiply exceedingly, so that one (not two) may in a single season produce a billion. And at last when autumn comes, won back from the cold god to his hot mother, they know love and wedlock, and die like all married things. These are the Aphides—sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight"—and they nourish themselves ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... 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. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0 |
