"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said bitterly. "For 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. You ...
— Competition • James Causey
... unconscious, Miss 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, ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... House the road soon traverses the famous mineral belt of the Comstock Lode. This belt is 7,000 feet wide and 6 miles long, and produced nearly a billion dollars. The first mine to be seen is the Haywood, lying to the west side of the road. This mine produced over ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... to get 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 ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... developed the stuff to fight off fungus on Venus, where one part in a billion did the trick. But it was tricky stuff; one part in ten-million would destroy the chlorophyll in plants in about twenty hours, or the hemoglobin in blood in about fifteen minutes. It was ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... soon recognize the symptoms. An idea strikes him; he becomes abstracted, reads a great deal, pull down books, fills pages of particularly ruled copy paper with figures from a big, round, black pencil until you might think he was calculating the expenditures of a Billion Dollar Congress. He is not a mathematician but, like Balzac, simply dotes on figures. Then comes the analytical stage and that he performs on foot, walking, head bent forward, upstairs, downstairs, outdoors, around the block, in again, through the clattering press room and up and ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... pass over us, without interruption, for three hours, at the rate we have mentioned, of one mile in a minute. This will give us a line one hundred and eighty miles long by one broad, and covering one hundred and eighty square miles. Now, allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have one billion, one hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock. As every pigeon consumes fully half a pint of food a day, the quantity required to feed such a flock for one day must be eight million, seven hundred and ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... 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
... with its scorn of ages, Its predilection for the past, Turns back about a billion pages And lands us by the Cam at last; Is it the thought of "Granta" (once our daughter), The Freshers' Match, the Second in our Mays That makes our mouth, our very soul to water? Ah no! Ah no! ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... growth, metabolism, and contractility. They stand upon the ancient ways; only, in accordance with that progress towards democracy, which a great political writer has declared to be the fatal characteristic of modern times, they substitute a republic formed by a few billion of "animulae" for the monarchy of ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... As they moved through the ship it was like walking in the treasure house of a Neptunian robber baron. "There's well over a billion in here," Nicko marveled. "Whatever you say about ...
— Before Egypt • E. K. Jarvis
... little tickling tingle that locates your spine for you. I'm sure there's no ennui here. Some one said the other day, "Ennui is a disease that comes from living on other people's money." I said no, that I'd often had as fine an attack as if I'd been left a billion, that ennui is when you don't know what to do next and wouldn't do it if you did. Well, here they always do know what to do next, and as one of them told me, "We always get up early the day before to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... after the day of the "Rocket's" victory eight thousand miles of railway were in operation in the United Kingdom. Another twenty-five years brought the total up to eighteen thousand miles, which had cost for construction nearly four billion dollars. At the same time (1883) the number of locomotives was 14,469, of cars, 490,661. Before Manchester and Liverpool were connected by railway thirty stage-coaches sufficed for the passenger traffic. ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... 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. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... 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
... 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 ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... as showing that the earth is still in process of formation just as much as it was a billion years ago. We see the same thing in Yellowstone Park. There most decided changes have taken place even in the last eight years. Old Faithful, which used to play regularly every sixty minutes, now does so only ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... finding people? Could a billion and a half human beings die, all at once, without leaving a single isolated group somewhere ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... must of necessity greatly alarm the owners of Russian securities who are interested in the economic progress of Russia." Soon afterwards it became known that Alphonse de Rothschild, the head of the great financial firm in Paris, refused to take a hand in floating the Russian loan of half a billion. This first protest of the financial king against the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Government produced a sensation, and it was intensified by the fact that it was uttered in France at a time when the diplomats of both countries were preparing to celebrate ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... 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. Without the railroads and ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... to Tickle Mary,' 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
... which was started in England 73 years ago, eliminates most of these waste expenses. The system has kept spreading at an astonishing rate; in Great Britain there are now 3 1/2 million members, and more than a billion of sales a year. Other European countries are full of these stores. Many of the retail stores have from twelve thousand to fifty thousand members; their sales run into the millions. They are federated in a wholesale agency which buys for ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... Immigration 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 ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... they have been taken over to Brooklyn where the German army is, and they've got to raise a billion ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... 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 is native to my soul. Let me hesitate no longer, but ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... chiselled on the triumphal arches of Paris to perpetuate his glory. In the later years of his reign his wars made serious inroads upon the treasury, and they were not always successful. The building of the immense and extravagant palace of Versailles, with its surroundings, costing a billion francs, was an act of folly often condemned, and was one of the burdens which broke down the treasury of the nation. Colbert was dead, and the king, with Louvois, his over-liberal minister, dissipated the resources he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... with Abraham when he prepared to offer up his son 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 desired to ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... 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 grandfather, ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... away, leaving the officer to descend the ladder in baffled fury to the ground below, where his men huddled together in the unfamiliar cold, and stared half fearful at the far-away sun glowing like a yellow arc-light in the depths of space half a billion miles away. ...
— The Space Rover • Edwin K. Sloat
... it back! The devil! It wasn't intended for any mortal man to marry you—Sally Ruth, I wouldn't marry you now for forty billion dollars and a mule! Turn loose, you hussy! ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... cause such a fury. A mere twenty Earth pounds of an indifferent grade of rock and a little iron, an irregular, ungraceful lump, spawned somewhere a billion years before as a star died. But it still had most of the awesome velocity and inertia ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... motionless dark. Silently portentous, it faded again into the dark, 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 thinly ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... when 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
... 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 ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... not care whether the earth was made in two billion years or two minutes, so long as it was made and we are satisfied with it. We do not care whether Jonah swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah. None of these things worry us in the least. We do not pin our faith on such little matters as those, but we try to so live that ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... found in the markets, are practically always in an advanced stage of putrefaction. Ordinary fresh, dried or salted meats contain from three million to ten times that number of bacteria per ounce, and such meats as Hamburger steak often contain more than a billion putrefactive organisms to the ounce. Nuts are ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... must go down 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 ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... he swept them off him as a tiger would wipe ants off his fur; at last he came to the window. There was the city of New York in front of him, the city of a million twinkling lights, the tomb of a billion dead hopes; the Morgue of a Nation, covered by laughing, painted faces. He raised the sash ...
— The Rat Racket • David Henry Keller
... for chickens and eggs in the United States would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!). It is solemnly recorded that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... controlling interest in nine billion dollars' worth of railways; in two billion dollars' worth of industrial concerns; in one billion dollars' worth of life insurance groups; in one billion dollars' worth of banking groups; in two billion ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... tour, during which 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, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine. (For three years France had to endure the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... of the economy and accounts for more than 30% of GDP, roughly 70% of export earnings, and 66% of government revenues. Proved oil reserves of 3.7 billion barrels should ensure continued output at current levels for 23 years. Oil has given Qatar a per capita GDP comparable to the leading West European industrial countries. Qatar's proved reserves of natural ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... one thousand, eight hundred and two holders, monopolized one thousand, two hundred and eight billion eight hundred million (1,208,800,000,000) board feet of standing timber—each a foot square and an inch thick. These figures are so stupendous that they are meaningless without a hackneyed device to bring their meaning home. These one thousand, eight hundred and two timber business ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... 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 ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to 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 says he, "Sing, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... important war-producing cause contributed to the 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 to fifty-six and the gold ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... 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
... a world-wide plague to turn the tide. The plague began in old China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world. It might have been a laboratory mutation, but nobody could ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... 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 ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... 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
... fools who come out two billion miles to scratch rock, as if there weren't enough already on the inner planets. He's got a rich platinum property. Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for his ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... and erecting coast defenses, in arming her soldiers with Krag-Joergensens, has not been deprived of schools, colleges, and opportunities essential to happiness and prosperity? In a decade we have spent nearly a billion dollars on our navy alone. Yes, we have aped the military fashions of Europe and have set a ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... cheap 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
... museum's high bay is the story of the Manhattan Engineer District, the unprecedented 2.2 billion dollar scientific-engineering project that was centered in New Mexico during World War II. The Manhattan Project as it was more commonly called, developed, built, and tested the world's first Atomic bomb in New Mexico. This display ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum
... how that commerce would soon boom at the expense of Great Britain! France would now have an opportunity to develop her socialistic experiments, as she would be permitted to maintain only a very small army. The mistake of 1870 must not be repeated. This time there would be no paltry levy of five billion francs. A great German Empire would rise on the ruins of the British. Commercial gain was the theme. I did not gather from the conversation that anybody but Germany would be a party ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... face, whose mournful smile he had not noticed, and fixed themselves on the bright fire. "'In those days,"' he said, "'men's relation to the eternal airs was the relation of a billion little separate draughts blowing against the south-west wind. They did not wish to merge themselves in that soft, moon-uttered sigh, but blew in its face through crevices, and cracks, and keyholes, and were borne away on the pellucid ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not 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
... down the trail that slanted into the valley and crossed the half-mile of "flats" whose wire fences and long, clean-cut irrigation ditches marked the passing of the cattle country. A billion mosquitoes filled the air with an unceasing low-pitched drone, and settled upon the horses in a close-fitting blanket of gray. The girls tried to fight off the stinging pests that attacked their faces and necks in whirring clouds. But they fought in vain and in vain they endeavored to ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... lay a devastated land. The destruction of property affected all classes of the population. The accumulated capital of the South had disappeared in worthless Confederate stocks, bonds, and currency. The banks had failed early in the war. Two billion dollars invested in slaves had been wiped out. Factories, which had been running before the war or were developed after 1861 in order to supply the blockaded country, had been destroyed by Federal raiders or seized and sold or dismantled because they had ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... 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, of every living being in ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... 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 ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do not suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... 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 far over seas from ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... on Earth, percentagewise. Of the three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand total of ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... 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. Beside ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... product of our gold and silver mines approaches now one billion of dollars, most of which has been converted into coin at our mint. Nearly all of this product has been obtained since the discovery of gold in California. Less than two per cent. of the precious metals has been the product of the seceded States. This gold and silver are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... a few days at Fullfield, and Hugh and Betty enjoyed themselves immensely. Hyacinth said it was just like staying for a week at the pantomime, and Betty said, with a deep sigh, that it was much nicer, a billion times nicer. ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... 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
... 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 of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... 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
... 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 your last ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo 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 dim distance, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... have known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... 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," they called it. ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart
... 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
... 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
... wonderful!" exclaimed Abdul, with delight radiating over his countenance. "Who would have thought that before the war! Forty billion dollars! Aren't we the financiers! Aren't we the bulwark of monetary power! Can you touch ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... Ten billion dollars would be all too small reward, a trifle totally inadequate to compensate, mere nominal recognition of the man who shall invent and realise a scheme to save this earthly paradise from this its damning ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... arms around his neck, and the hot tears told her heartfelt joy as she sobbed out: 'Charley, I thank you a thousand times. I never expected so nice a cloak. This seems like other days. You are so good, and I am so happy.'" The drink bill of our Nation for last year was over a billion of dollars, more money than was spent for missions—home and foreign—for all of our Churches, for public education, for all the operations of courts of justice and of public officers, and at least for two ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... Sciences. Based on these calculations, fallout from the 500-plus megatons of nuclear testing through 1970 will produce between 2 and 25 cases of genetic disease per million live births in the next generation. This means that between 3 and 50 persons per billion births in the post-testing generation will have genetic damage for each megaton of nuclear yield exploded. With similar uncertainty, it is possible to estimate that the induction of cancers would range from 75 to 300 cases per ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... 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; ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... 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
... each one of those seconds was a 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 ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... 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, he himself ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... an hour the exact time of their departure. We'll simply go out the distance light has traveled since that time, gather in the rays given off, amplify them a few billion times, and take a look at ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers. Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples for his telescopes. Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... can come all the way from Missoula to Broadway in one year and win a world's series game is of course entitled to much credit, but this boy certainly fell into a particularly soft spot. With the Macks' billion dollar infield killing base hits for him and the attack getting him eight runs, he would have had a hard time slipping the game to McGraw if he had sold out before hostilities started. Bush permitted the Giants, who were commonly reported to be moaning for the gore of Mack's youngsters, just ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... fellow, might just as well give a sly kick with his heel to the granite,) before time will be at an end, and the burden of flesh accomplished. But you hear it expressed in terms that will astonish Baron Rothschild, what is the progress in liquidation which we make for each particular century. A billion of centuries pays off a quantity equal to a pinch of snuff. Despair seizes a man in contemplating a single coupon, no bigger than a visiting card, of such a stock as this; and behold we have to keep on paying away ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... said, "The proof is there. We estimate that each of Rigel's planets now supports a population of nearly one billion." ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Sierra Nevada Mountains, around and around in a circle, shot through a snow shed forty miles long; then lumber chutes appear many miles in length, through which enormous logs are shot down by water power from the mountain lake. Four billion feet of lumber are ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... ten-thousand-acre field the whole field would be rotten in twenty-four hours! It spreads from stalk to stalk with a rapidity that is amazing. One germ multiplies itself in a living cornfield a billion times in twelve hours. It would not only be possible, but certain that twenty of van Heerden's agents in America could destroy the harvests of the ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... 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
... was promoted by the German military despotism. It probably was encouraged by the results of three wars—one against Denmark which robbed her of territory, one against Austria which robbed her of territory, and one against France which robbed her of territory and a cash indemnity of a billion dollars. These seemingly easy successes encouraged their perpetrators to plan for the pillage and enslavement of ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... that all we got for nine years' work and half a billion dollars?" They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and Colon, forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... I said, 'it is like this. While they are still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide waters,—silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim and pick it up. The mother, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... asking why. But professors and philosophers and preachers and teachers and all holy rollers like socialists ain't got it. They want to reduce the whole blamed cosmos to a system, and she won't reduce. I forget now just how many billion cells in your body"—he pointed the pipe at Sharon Whipple, who stirred uneasily—"but ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Christian land, in city and country, this great man-eatin' trade costs the country over a billion dollars a year, and devours one hundred and twenty thousand men each year, and destroys the soul and mind first, before ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... the instrument board. "Nearly a million miles out and headed for that Sargasso Sea I told you about," he said. "It isn't visible in the telescope, but I've got it marked by the stars. Out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, a quarter of a billion miles away. But we'll average better than a thousand miles a second. Be there in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... country will not be satisfied with President Cleveland's platform—with his free trade primer. They believe in good wages for good work, and they know that this is the richest nation in the world. The Republic is worth at least sixty billion dollars. This vast sum is the result of labor, and this labor has been protected either directly or indirectly. This vast sum has been made by the farmer, the mechanic, the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... ape-men in millions of years. The history of the world and 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 ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... 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 pounds ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... but there aren't many right men," said Upton. "I've no doubt there's somebody equal to the occasion somewhere, but with the population of the world at the present figures there's a billion chances to one she'll never meet him. What do you think of the financial ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... sacred 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 on ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... 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
... 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' then ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... 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 ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... 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 ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... mutual savings banks. About one third of these banks are on the mutual plan, having no capital stock (most of them in the East) and these contain about four fifths of all the deposits. The stock savings banks have individual deposits of over a billion dollars, and have outstanding capital stock to the amount of about $90,000,000 (about 9 per cent of their deposits). These stock savings banks to a much greater extent than do the mutual banks transact also a ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... friendship with 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 population, ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... 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
... this tiger!" he mumbled. "He is in the hands of a witch. We shall find him as harmless as an old cat. Baboo will break out his teeth with a club of billion wood and bite off his claws with his own ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... there next the hills, and there's some fair hay land we're putting water on. We have to winter-feed practically everything these days. The range just nicely keeps the stock from snow to snow. I've got pitchfork callouses on my hands I never will outgrow if I was to fall heir to a billion dollars and never use my hands again for fifty years except to feed myself. It takes work, believe me! And if there's anything on earth a puncher hates worse than work, it's some ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... 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
... Having this in mind, it is rather curious to think of electricity as being an article of export, an item in international trade. Yet in 1913 hydro-electric companies in Canada "exported" by means of wires, to this country over 772,000,000 kilowatt-hours (over one billion horsepower hours) of electricity for use in factories near ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... the debt of the country was two billion dollars and twenty cents. Two dollars and ninety cents in greenbacks would buy ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... to do the work of the all-knower, just as our respective souls or selves in popular philosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like a joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. If our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing our billion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts. But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active principles called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having, as it thinks, definitively demolished them. And altho some ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... bacteriologic batteries appears to have been intrusted the most hopeless task, the forlorn hope,—the total extermination of a foe so tiny that he had to be magnified five hundred times before he was even visible, and of such countless myriads that he was at least a billion times as numerous as the human race. But here again, as in the centre of the battle-line, when we once made up our minds to fight, we were not long in discovering points of attack and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... 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 race? Strange marine monsters crawling about in the bed of an air-ocean, unable to swim ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... should fit uncompressed on a 1.44M floppy, is a million and a quarter digits of Pi. We are also working on one billion. The tail has also been checked against the 400 million digits we have already received from Mr. Kanada of Japan, and we also hope to check against the figures we expect from ...
— Pi to 1,000,000 places • Scott Hemphill
... 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 ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... 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 ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... cajoled, implored, threatened, or argued. "Thor is eligible to play four years of football at old Bannister. I call him Thor, after the great Norse god, Thor; he is of Norwegian descent. That is all of the Billion-Dollar Mystery I can disclose; ten thousand dollars offered for ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... 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
... drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... coils are strong enough to process all the protons so that their axis of spin is brought into alignment. At this point, the plastic could be thought of as representing a few billion tiny gyroscopes all lined ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... 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 time. Paul is down thar, settin' under a bush readin' ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to the first question, it is a much more difficult problem today to locate and develop a supply of oil to replace the annual world production (recently half a billion barrels), than it was twenty years ago, when it was necessary for this purpose to find only one-fifth this amount; and if the demand is unchecked, it will be still more difficult to replace the three-quarters of a billion barrels of oil which will ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... two billion cents would you risk a scrap with me, you money-sweater, you," was Daughtry's retort. "You've got their goats, but I've got your number. Not for two billion billion cents would you excite me into ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... 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 colonization, it is true, but business managers, engineers, mine foremen, ...
— 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
... suppressing the Roman Catholic Church and arresting political dissidents. Cuba is slowly recovering from severe economic recession following the withdrawal of former-Soviet subsidies, worth $4billion-$6 billion per year, in 1990. ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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 only ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... 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
... we've never penetrated. The fact that they're supplying the Croutha with guns proves that; there isn't a firearm on any of the time lines our people are legitimately exploiting. And there are only about three billion time lines on this belt ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... counsellor, the optimistic teacher, and the appreciative audience for six children and a husband, besides a lot of neighbors who carried their troubles to her. She performed more mental work than it takes to manage a billion dollar trust. She kept six children, not only out of mischief, but happily busy at all sorts of household and outdoor work which it was well for them to know. They learned to keep house and farm by keeping them, whilst she sat by and enthused and directed their ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... hopes awakened by this movement, just so deep was the dejection and chagrin into which its advocates were thrown upon receiving the report of the engineers who made the preliminary survey. The estimated cost ran towards a quarter of a billion, four times the capital stock of the company; and there were not lacking those who pointed out that the Erie Canal had cost more than double the ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... 1915-16, with an additional $101,752,542 for universities. By 1920 the total expenditures for the maintenance of public elementary, secondary, and higher education in the United States will probably total a billion dollars. These rapidly increasing expenditures merely record the changing political conception as to the national importance of enlarging the educational opportunities and advantages of those who are to constitute and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... now our chief vegetable fiber, the yearly crop being over six billion pounds, of which the United States raises three-fourths. Texas is the largest producer, followed by Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The remainder of the world supply comes chiefly from India, Egypt, Russia, and Brazil. The Hindoos were the first ancient people to make ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... neck! Jokes about your own town's soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile," she confided proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar French cars. And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store. But we used to ride home ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... intrusion of his kind on a two thousand-something miles-in-diameter globe of incredible desert, overlapping ring-walls, craters centered in radiating streaks of white ash, mountain ranges that sank gradually into dust, which once, two billion years ago, after probable ejection from volcanoes, had no doubt floated in a then palpable atmosphere. But now, to a lone man down there, they would be bleak plains stretching to a ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... and all his people had come very close to 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 ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering something intently. "Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometers? It would take a billion years to ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... great-grandparents, and always have had "manners." There are other social sets which pass as representative society, into which all the ill-mannered nouveau riche can climb by the golden stairs; but this is not real society. The richest man in America, Rockefeller, quoted at over a billion, is a religious worker, and his indulgences consist in gifts to universities. Another billionaire, Mr. Carnegie, gives his millions to found libraries. Mr. Morgan, the millionaire banker, attends church conventions as an antipodal ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... farthest bounds of the visible universe; so that, provided only that in quantity it remain sufficient for the purpose, its peculiarities can be equally well studied whether the source of its vibrations be one foot or a hundred billion miles distant. Now the most obvious distinction between one kind of light and another resides in colour. But of this distinction the eye takes cognisance in an aesthetic, not in a scientific sense. It finds gladness in ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... hunger), it was manifest now to my wondering mind 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 ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... ascertained that the interest on his moneys amounted to $19,140.86. A week before the 23d of September, the whole million was gone, including the amounts won in Lumber and Fuel and other luckless enterprises. He still had about $17,000 of his interest money in the banks, but he had a billion pangs in his heart—the interest ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... August, 1918, three months 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 that by the spring of 1918 ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... 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
... everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to the following of them as a matter of course.... Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good, and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher, he will probably laugh at ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... pouring drinkable water into its sewers. This water was brought close to the eastward edge of the city by a huge canal, and then raised by an enormous battery of pumps into reservoirs at a level of four hundred feet above the sea, from which it spread by a billion arterial branches over the city. Thence it poured down, cleansing, sluicing, working machinery of all sorts, through an infinite variety of capillary channels into the great drains, the cloacae maximae, and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... dining-room and a beautiful view of the great avenue. The evening was warm. The windows were open and from the outside came the noises of a Parisian night. A soft July moon lent radiance to an otherwise garish world, and a billion stars twinkled merrily. It seemed to Corky, as he looked up into the mellow dome, that he had never known the stars to twinkle so madly as they twinkled on this fateful night. There were moments of illusion ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... between the two friends were patched up. Dig, under a pledge of secrecy, was initiated into the whole mystery of the sack, and the wedge of paper, and the wax vestas, promising on his part to respect his friend's reputation in the matter of the "fifty-six billion Snowball." ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... attributable to large and growing oil exports. 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 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 ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... wife, the mistress of my establishment, a hostess, a social leader, what a figure she would make! And too, the alliance between Flint and myself simply must not be shattered. Kate is the only child. The old man's billion, or more, will surely come to her, practically every penny of it. Flint is more than sixty-three this very minute, he's a dope-fiend, and his heart's damned weak. He's liable to drop off, any moment. If I get Kate, and he dies, what a fortune! What a prize! Added to my interests, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... there you'll go without me," declared Whopper firmly. "I wouldn't tempt that—-er—-crazy fellow again for a billion dollars! Why, he might come out and carve a chap all up with a butcher knife, or blow your ...
— Out with Gun and Camera • Ralph Bonehill
... public investments, the people, in fairness, can demand no more; in justice to themselves, they may accept no less. Are they receiving a fair return? The people of the United States have invested nearly a billion dollars in the public school system; each year they contribute nearly half a billion dollars more toward the same end. Are they getting ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing |
