"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 years. This fact is but ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... system, which was started in England 73 years ago, eliminates most of these waste expenses. The system has kept spreading at an astonishing rate; in Great Britain there are now 3 1/2 million members, and more than a billion of sales a year. Other European countries are full of these stores. Many of the retail stores have from twelve thousand to fifty thousand members; their sales run into the millions. They are federated in a wholesale agency which ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... country twelve hundred 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... to live with change and even to welcome it because the time of troubles through which their society is passing is warning them of the dangers they face. At the same time they are learning, bit by bit, of the spectacular achievements of the billion human beings in ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... 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 ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... businesses. He thought of Hyram Logan and family; the shopkeeper from Titan with three sets of twin boys; the Martian miner who had spent twenty-five futile years searching for uranium in the asteroid belt. They were all ready to go over fifty billion miles into deep space and begin their lives again. Tom shook his head. He wondered if he had a choice whether he would chance the mystery and danger of ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... "There's something devilish funny going on there. I've lost about a billion dollars in the last ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... firmly established and everywhere recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It has some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million communicants, and property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon this property it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national; which means, quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... man and lover You have divined and visualized, In quiet day dreams. And what is strange Your boy of eight is subtly guised In fleeting looks that half resemble Something in me. Two souls may range Mid this earth's billion souls for life, And hide their hunger or dissemble. For there are two at least created, Endowed with alien powers that draw, And kindred powers that by some law Bind souls as like as sister, brother. There are two at least who are for each other. If we are ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... slowly to his 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 had ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 all last year the chiff-chaff ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... and 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
... very many Controllers on Earth, percentagewise. Of the three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand total ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... are 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 rivers are most interesting. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... mathematics. For it is easy to calculate that if there are a half million fish in Lake Michigan and each fish displaces less than five cubic inches of water there would be only two and a half million cubic inches of fish altogether lost in an expanse containing at least eight hundred billion cubic inches of water. Therefore, the chance of one fish being at any one particular spot are one in four hundred thousand. In other words, the odds against each of these strangely patient men watching the ends of their fishpoles—the odds against their catching ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... declared 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 ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... unloading any diamonds. For another; no rajah could possibly have the wealth involved. Why, do you know that since this plot unfolded, over five million carats' worth have made their appearance—and that means something like a billion dollars." ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... of business 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-tenth that sum. One sees two men, drunk with their success, gouging and tearing at each other's hearts in Wall Street, and sees their gouging and tearing bring about a panic which takes from the people in an hour over a billion dollars and drives scores to suicide, murder, and defalcation—the two men continuing meanwhile as ornamental pillars of society instead of wearing prison stripes. One sees a great railroad corporation, in which are millions of the trust funds of widows, orphans, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... 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 ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... that once more I had chanced upon a good, and warm, and steadfast heart. Every body is said to be born, whether that happens by night or day, with a certain little widowed star, which has lost its previous mortal, concentrating from a billion billion of miles, or leagues, or larger measure, intense, but generally invisible, radiance upon him or her; and to take for the moment this old fable as of serious meaning, my star was to find bad facts at a glance, but no bad folk without ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... awakening new productive powers in all parts of the world and of adding new territories which engage in the exchange of goods with the civilized nations of the world? Since the founding of the new German Empire, German foreign trade has increased from 5-1/2 to approximately 20 billion marks. Germany has become the best customer of a great number of countries. Not only has the German consumption of provisions and luxuries increased in an unusual degree, also that of meat, tropical fruits, sugar, tobacco and colonial products, but above all ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... 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 ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... 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 ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the 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
... toward that ornery 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 eye on fur some ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... urged to convert them into evidence of national debt, bearing interest at five per cent, with the understanding that if more paper were afterward needed more would be issued. All in vain. The official tables of depreciation show that the assignats continued to fall. A forced loan, calling in a billion of these, checked this fall, but only for a moment. The "interconvertibility scheme" between currency and bonds failed as dismally as the "interconvertibility scheme" between currency and land had ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... 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
... build her own merchant marine, then with her own ships, loaded with her own goods, in her own harbor at Manila, she has easy access to the Orient, with its seven hundred and fifty millions of people, who purchased last year more than a billion and a half dollars worth of the kind of goods we have to sell, and much of it cotton goods, which means future employment for the growing millions of negroes in the South. While it may be best to confine our territorial domain within our ocean ditches, we must encourage commercial expansion, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... of the men, growled brief instructions. "If there's any difficulty, remember we're civilizing a planet of nearly a billion population. The life or death of a few individuals is meaningless. Look at our position scientifically, dispassionately. If it becomes necessary to use force—we have the right and the might to back it up. MacBride, you stay with the ship. ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... offices,—the steam or electric cars will carry them eight or ten miles in the time that it would take to walk one mile. The postal service and the telegraph are sure and rapid. So also is the telephone. No wonder, then, that our commerce has reached the fabulous sum of one billion, five hundred million dollars in ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... smell had not stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this night was like a pale, golden day. It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was Puskowepesim—the Molting Moon—and the wolves were not hunting, the ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... Jackson Manning, had first generated the curvature field and overcome gravity, had left his grandson a fortune that approached the five-billion mark. But that had not been all. From his famous ancestor, Manning had inherited a keen, sharp, scientific mind. From his mother's father, Anthony Barret, he had gained an astute business sense. But unlike his maternal ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... 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
... financing her share of the war, for it is a costly business. Three domestic war loans, totaling $450,000,000, were voluntarily subscribed, each in fact being doubly underwritten, and yet the savings of the people in the banks is (1917) the highest on record—over a billion and a quarter. Part of the war revenue is being raised by war taxes on letters, checks, legal documents and some articles of import. Happily the normal revenue of the country was never so large nor the trade of the Dominion so buoyant. All these factors are helping ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... is indicated by the fact that in the forty years between 1868 and 1908, forty agreements, treaties, and conventions had been concluded between the two countries. Nor was intimacy confined to the Governments. The peace arranged by President Diaz had brought foreign capital by the billion to aid the internal development of the country, and of this money more had come from the United States than from any other nation. Nor was it financial aid alone which had gone across the border. There was but little American ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... Will," Tommy said, as he laid down a great armful of dry wood, "some one ought to invent some kind of a contraption to kill these flying pests off by the billion. Here it is almost cold enough to snow, and we're being eaten ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... 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 Canada ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... 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
... hanging two or three bags to each boat, the treatment of even a large reservoir may be accomplished in from four to six hours. It is necessary, of course, to reduce as much as possible the time required for applying the copper, so that for immense supplies, with a capacity of several billion gallons, it would probably be desirable to use a launch, carrying long projecting spars to which could be attached bags containing several hundred ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... 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
... and 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 dollars down! ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... 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 vast, and it is constantly growing. The indexable Web is growing at a rate of approximately ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... there before his eyes, and represented a treasure of probably half a billion dollars in gold ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There were mountains and seas in a morsel of wet mud, picturesque enough for microscopic tourists. A billion billion morsels of wet mud were no more imposing than one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy—they were all in the splashes of mud from a passing carriage. Everywhere one law and one futility. The human ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000 gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of dilution ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... one billion dollars a year. We have boards of trades, the best railroads in the world, and packing-houses that can kill ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... said in his softly modulated voice, "I kinda guess there's a rat amongst us. I wouldn't like for to be that there rat—no, not for a billion hundred dollars. No, I wouldn't. Becuz that there rat has bit my little girlie, Eve,—like that there deer bit her up onto Star Peak.... No, I wouldn't like for to be that there rat. Fer he's a-goin' to die like a rat, same's that there deer is a-goin' to die like a deer.... Anyone ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... anxiety. Queens will have you brought to their palaces to make them laugh and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their mascot and write love-letters to you from the trenches. I will have a billion pictures made of you, and you shall breathe and move in all of them. You shall live a million lives at once. I will have your other self placed in museums so that centuries from now they can take you out and bring ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... hundreds of thousands of atoms, constituting 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 a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... as some think, to grind me into powder, and then endow each crushed particle with individual sense of endless misery? What if there be a hell! In a few minutes, or what will seem but a few minutes —for surely, to the disembodied spirit, time cannot exist; though it sleep a billion years, it will be as a breath—I shall have solved the problem. I shall know what all the panic-stricken millions madly ask, and ask in vain! Yes, I shall know if there is a hell! Well, if there be, then I shall rule there, for power ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of a certain number of vibrations, in vacuo, 'insulated' the medium. It is difficult to suggest an explanation non-technically, and if you are really interested you should read Carder's lecture on 'Astral Vibrations Compared with Matero-involuted Vibrations below the Six-Billion Limit.' ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... committee of the Boston Executive Business Association in 1891 estimated that two billion dollars of property in Boston escaped taxation, and that the public treasury was cheated out of about $17,000,000 in taxes every year. As for New York City, we have seen how the Astors, the Schermerhorns, the Goelets—the whole ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... process of art. I have seen it in specimens of old Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments. How strange that decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce these beautiful effects! The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so that it would vanish, like ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in 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
... 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... our total national expenditure reached the $1,000,000,000 point, and the Congress voting this expenditure was nicknamed the "Billion-dollar Congress." What would we say of an expenditure of half a billion dollars for defence alone! With what admiration, too, must we regard 65,000,000 people, living in an area one quarter smaller than Texas, on a by-no-means rich or fertile soil, who can bear cheerfully ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 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," they ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart
... what lighted Pale billion to its fated doom, Our nuptial song is blighted, And its rose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... point of visiting Byron, Moore, Hunt, Scott, and that clique. You must bear in mind that we do not all live on one point of space here; among so many thousand million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, sextillion, and countless illions, there must be some persons who are further apart than Morris and I, who are side ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... ago burned over an area of two thousand square miles. It killed about fourteen hundred people and destroyed many millions of dollars worth of timber and other property. A big forest fire in Michigan laid waste a tract forty miles wide and one hundred and eighty miles long. More than four billion feet of lumber, worth $10,000,000, was destroyed and several hundred people lost their lives. In recent years, a destructive forest fire in Minnesota caused a loss of $25,000,000 ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... A billion years of life and death Are but a moment or a breath To one unknown Immortal Force Who guides the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... hooked to the transformer, and short-circuited it, not knowing, of course, just what he was doing. The result was that when Tode pressed that lever, instead of blowing the whole contraption to pieces, he got a couple of billion volts of electricity through his body, combined with a larger amperage than has ever been imagined. It burned him to a few grease spots. He simply—vanished. You don't remember what you ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... explained later on, the moths have been induced to lay within bottomless round tins placed on the circles on the cards. The eggs are sticky when laid and therefore adhere. In a year 35,000,000 cards, containing about a billion eggs, are produced ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... vaits for 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
... a truce. The Northern Securities Company was created, with a capital approaching a billion dollars, to take over the Burlington, Northern Pacific, and Great ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... 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, ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... century ago. Of these street lamps about twenty-five 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 are constantly being discovered, so ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... 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
... just stepping into the commander's cabin as the two men entered the air lock. MacMaine didn't see him again until the ship was twelve minutes on her way—nearly five billion miles ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... of the equinoxes, squared by the parallelogram of an ellipsoidal bath-bun fresh from the glass cylinder of a refreshment bar, we find that we are now travelling in a perpetual circle at a distance of one billion marine gasmeters from the Sun. I have now accounted for the milk ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... every government of the world. Our foreign commerce has shown great increase in volume and value. The combined imports and exports for the year are the largest ever shown by a single year in all our history. Our exports for 1899 alone exceeded by more than a billion dollars our imports and exports combined in 1870. The imports per capita are 20 per cent less than in 1870, while the exports per capita are 58 per cent more than in 1870, showing the enlarged capacity of the United States to satisfy the wants of its own increasing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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 rake an' ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... a billion and a half. If that is true, then it's possible that there are four people in the world, beside yourself, with the thumb and two fingers of the right hand marked exactly ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... of a sudden I has a sinkin' sensation somewhere under my vest, the bumpin' stops, and I feels like I'd shuffled off somethin' heavy. I had—a billion tons or more! Glancin' over the side, I sees the water ten or a dozen feet below us. We were in the air. And, believe me, I reaches out for something solid to hold onto! All I could find was a two-inch upright, ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... next to the Ganga and thence to the 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 devotion ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the migration of nations point to one locality where the human race began in times not more remote, and show that man was created in a civilized state, and, therefore, never was a brute. If evolution were true, there would have been many billion times as many human beings as now exist, a great multitude of invented languages with little or no similarity, a vast number of invented religions with little, if anything, in common. Even the sciences invented and exploited by evolutionists, ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... and mechanical invention. It was the aim of Sam Walter Foss to immortalize the age of steel. "Harness all your rivers above the cataracts' brink, and then unharness man." He told me he thought the subject of mechanics was as poetical as the song of the lark. "The Cosmos wrought for a billion years to make glad for a day," reminds us of the most resonant periods ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... 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
... the youth so that everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to the following of them as a matter of course.... Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good, and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... - I tire, I tire of these; But I, the Maker of a billion suns, Ask men to stop the blasphemy of guns.' This ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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
... o'er-population, when the centuries in rotation Shall 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... has been a kind of special White House ambassador to Capitol Hill. While the legislative committees struggled with the controversial proposal to by-pass the appropriating process and give the President authority to borrow $8,800,000,000 (8 billion, 800 million) for development lending in the next five years, he was the man in the ante-room empowered to answer questions in the ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... 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
... overthrow of the rebellion, and the perpetuity of the Union, and bring 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 by every State, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... announced that it was organized "for a design which will hereafter be promulgated." Owners began to sell, the mob caught the suggestion, a panic ensued, the South Sea Company stock fell 800 points in a few days, and more than a billion dollars evaporated in this ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... before the 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 made ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... 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 scare dis niggah to where I jest lay down in d' pew an' howl. After I'se done lamented till my ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... cylinder. From the knowledge of this torsion the rigidity can be deduced. In the case of a solution containing 1/2 per cent. of gelatine, it is found that this rigidity, enormous compared with that of water, is still, however, one trillion eight hundred and forty billion times ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... captain of volunteers in the scandalous little Black Hawk War, where he jokingly said he "bled, died, and came away," although he never had a skirmish nor saw an Indian, he had risen to the chief command in a war that numbered three thousand battles and skirmishes and cost three billion dollars. Having no ancestry himself, being able to trace his line by rumor and tradition only as far back as his grandfather, he became, like George Washington, the Father of his Country. Born of a father who could not write his name, ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... back here broke. He knows the banks has got wise and they ain't going to back him no further than they have. They're too busy lending a billion dollars or so to the folks over in Europe to help blow ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... people? Could a billion and a half human beings die, all at once, without leaving a single ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... 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. ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... back to the reception. It was pretty big. Parade of the Aero Club and Squadron A, me in an open-face hack, feeling like a boob while sixty leven billion people cheered. Then reception by mayor, me delivering letter from mayor of Chicago which I had cutely sneaked out in Chicago and mailed to myself here, N. Y. general delivery, so I wouldn't lose it on the way. Then biggest dinner I've ever seen, must have been a thousand there, at the Astor, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... singular fact in the natural history of the "passenger," is their countless numbers. Audubon saw a flock that contained "one billion one hundred and sixteen millions of birds!" Wilson counted, or rather computed, another flock of "two thousand two hundred and thirty millions!" These numbers seem incredible. I have no doubt of their truth. I have no doubt ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... 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 a vision Miss ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... had left the world of Tor-tu I still lingered in the heavens around the planet and examined a few of its moons. While enjoying this pleasing diversion, I learned that not far away, less than one billion miles, there was a world without an atmosphere. This peculiar condition was not new to me, for I had seen, during my never-to-be-forgotten journey, ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... 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 ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... provinces together, building railroads from Atlantic to Pacific, canals from tide water to the Great Lakes. In actual cash this cost Canada four hundred million dollars, not counting land grants and private subscriptions for stock, which would bring up the cost of binding the provinces together to a billion. This was a staggering burden for a country with smaller population than Greater New York—a burden as big as Japan and Russia assumed for their war; but, like war, the expenditure was a fight for national existence. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut |
