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We've got the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble when it comes to crime in this country. The FBI says burglary and robbery cost U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion annually. Securities fraud alone costs four times that. And securities fraud is nothing to the cost of oil spills, price-fixing, and dangerous or defective products. Fraud by health-care corporations alone costs us between $100 billion and $400 billion a year. No three-strikes-and-you're-out for these guys. Remember the S&L scandal? $500 billion.
Molly IvinsYet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
Michael LewisThe truth, of course, is that a billion falsehoods told a billion times by a billion people are still false.
Travis WaltonThere are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a billion people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.
A. Whitney BrownI think that humans are also set up to survive. We're not as small as rats, but we make up for that by being intelligent enough to make our own hiding places and to adapt to new habitats, even if they are changing very quickly. We have an enormous population, and can afford to lose billions of people without suffering very much as a species. Indeed, some would say losing five billion people would be good for the planet - I disagree with them, but can't deny that we would do just fine if there were two billion of us or even one billion.
Annalee NewitzI'm very pessimistic about that, no matter how hard we may try. The Chinese market is huge, but out of last year's $2 billion box office, $1.8 billion was taken in by foreign movies, and just $200 million by our own movies, no matter how much we have learned of their techniques, or their good practices. The Hollywood movies imported into China are all good movies; does the U.S. make lousy movies? Yes, too many lousy movies, but the imports are good films, so how can they not be box office hits? They're all hits.
Jackie ChanYou can either have one guy lifting a billion pounds by himself, and it takes many years of planning and preparation - or you can have a billion people, each lifting one pound, and it takes a mere moment. This is the power of unity.
Jacque FrescoThere are five billion human beings and in a certain way I think we need five billion different religions.
Dalai LamaThe wealthiest 300 people have greater riches than the three billion poorest. The three wealthiest people have greater riches than the 48 poorest countries put together. With only limited environmental space to accommodate the expected 9 billion human inhabitants of the world by 2050, such disparities in consumption are clearly not sustainable
Tony JuniperRight now we have a $600-billion or so Defense Department budget, but when you add in, for example, a trillion-dollar nuclear weapons program over the next decade or two, it adds significantly to it. So it's somewhere around $600 billion. We call for approximately cutting that in half and instead putting those dollars into true security here at home.
Jill SteinFor every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained - and that's our present universe.
Albert EinsteinIn the eyes of many business leaders, there is never an opportune moment for tax reform. Yes, the economy is losing momentum, but that is not because a handful of people are losing their privileges. Slow growth did not first begin during my term in office; the market downturn is making itself felt around the world. My government has responded with an agenda aimed at raising productivity. We are also investing substantially in infrastructure - the plan calls for โฌ20.5 billion or $26.3 billion by 2021.
Michelle BacheletI lowered taxes in New York. I reduced the size of government in New York. I took a $2.4 billion deficit and turned it into a $3.2 billion surplus. And I reduced taxes over 23 times or 23 times.
Rudy GiulianiThe universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.
Jack VanceThere's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite.
B. J. NovakForests ... are in fact the world's air-conditioning system-the very lungs of the planet-and help to store the largest body of freshwater on the planet ... essential to produce food for our planet's growing population. The rainforests of the world also provide the livelihoods of more than a billion of the poorest people on this Earth... In simple terms, the rainforests, which encircle the world, are our very life-support system-and we are on the verge of switching it off.
Prince CharlesIf Congress wants to mess with the retirement program, why don't we let them start by changing their retirement program, and not have one, instead of talking about getting rid of Social Security and Medicare that was robbed $700 billion dollars to pay for Obamacare.
Mike HuckabeeThe larger point is this: We've invested over half a billion dollars in New York since this department was stood up. We've given New York more money, by more than double, than any other city in the country.
Michael ChertoffLike morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.
Jean-Paul SartreJust because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn't mean you have to use them all in a solo.
Kirk HammettI don't see anything beneficial about the US spending 100 billion dollars to go back to the moon unless we learn something new that will help us go to the moons of Saturn okay and so we ought to use that to breed new breakthroughs and to test new breakthroughs and to fund it.
Burt RutanIn mid-May, the House of Representatives approved the full amount of money that the Veterans Administration said was needed for next year - plus an additional $1 billion increase for veterans' health care.
Doc HastingsGlobalization was supposed to break down barriers between continents and bring all peoples together. But what kind of globalization do we have with over one billion people on the planet not having safe water to drink?
Mikhail GorbachevOne hundred and fifty years ago the vacant lands of the West were opened to private use. One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act, probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted. Under the impetus of that Act and other laws, more than 1.1 billion acres of the original public main have been transferred to private and non-federal public ownership. The 768 million acres remaining in federal ownership are a valuable national asset.
John F. KennedyThe Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
Flannery O'ConnorThis whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.
Herman MelvilleTechnology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.
Marc AndreessenI have $100 billion... You realize I could spend $3 million a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime.
Bill GatesTV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using.
Marc AndreessenI realized the universe is 15 billion years old and unspeakably complicated. I still love the teachings of Christ, but I also believe that the human condition prevents us from having any true objective knowledge and understanding of the universe.
MobyAthletes become our heroes, because they're superhuman. They do things nobody else can do. They're better than 6 billion other people.
Charlie SheenAs the titanic losses were racking up, Fannie Mae's operators, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, disguised the catastrophe by orchestrating a $5 billion accounting fraud - all the while continuing to pressure banks to make absurd, politically correct loans and denouncing Republicans as enemies of the poor.
Ann CoulterThe television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
Ray BradburyFor half of the world's population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an "electocracy" than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life--food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.
Barack ObamaLook at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiIf you owe fifty dollars you're a piker; if you owe fifty thousand dollars you're a businessman; if you owe fifty million dollars you're a tycoon; if you owe fifty billion dollars you're the government.
Sam LevensonIt's extremely hard to build a company with a product that everyone loves, is free and has no business model, and then to innovate a business model. I did that with Kazaa, had half a billion downloads but that wasn't a sustainable business.
Niklas ZennstromIt will be good for us in the long run, and I mean there are, you know, six and a half billion people in this world. And it's great for 300 million to keep enjoying more and more property, but I think it's terrific if, you know, the remainder do.
Warren BuffettSnow always inspires such awe in me. Just consider one tiny snowflake alone, so delicate, so fragile, so ethereal. And yet, let a billion of them come together through the majestic force of nature, they can screw up a whole city.
Betty WhiteSomebody's buying these treasury bills at 1/20th of one percent. I mean we consuming about $2 billion a day of goods and services beyond what we're producing.And it reflects American's consumption ideas rather than its savings ideas.
Howard Warren BuffettI bought a company in the mid-90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.
Warren BuffettThe next most dangerous thing [after nuclear proliferation] is probably... global warming, and then, right behind that are overpopulation -- we need to get serious about family planning-and trying to alleviate poverty, to get clean, renewable energy, probably with solar panels to the billion and a half people in the world who don't have access to electricity.
Ted TurnerWe have to create a sustainable environment, worldwide, and we're not doing it. The best thing we can do with the rest of this century is aggressively acquire - and put aside - the richest natural reserves that we can, and then do our best to manage the needs and desires of the 11 billion people we expect to have by the end of the century. This is where biology is headed. For that reason, the sooner we get on with mapping biodiversity on Earth, the better off biology will be - not to mention the whole subject of saving it before we carelessly throw it away.
E. O. Wilson