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Yet 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 LewisHow is it possible that a process can be democratic when it comes by way of money? If there is money then it can be elected a senator, it can be elected a representative. Do you know how much it cost to be elected president of the United States? The amount has reached, billions of dollars, 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion dollars, that's how much a presidential campaign costs. How much does a senatorial campaign cost? It costs 80 to 90 million dollars; or the campaign of a representative, 40 to 50 million. Is that really a democracy?
Alejandro Castro EspinWe have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Carl SaganThis sounds crazy, I know, but you can make a billion dollars - very few people do - but you can make a billion dollars on a product. It can be "Lion King," it can be "Simpsons," it can be "Family Guy," who knows what it is. Or you can make zero. But you can't make a billion dollars if you don't own it.
Henry BlodgetUndocumented immigrants produced $1.58 billion in state revenues, which exceeded the $1.16 billion in state services they received. However, local governments bore the burden of $1.44 billion in uncompensated health care costs and local law enforcement costs not paid for by the state.
Carole KeetonIs the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.
Bill GatesThe appropriation of public money always is perfectly lovely until some one is asked to pay the bill. If we are to have a billion dollars of navy, half a billion of farm relief, etc... the people will have to furnish more revenue by paying more taxes. It is for them, through their Congress, to decide how far they wish to go.
Calvin CoolidgeThe budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than ยฃ18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed ยฃ20 billion.
Joseph StiglitzOf the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.
P. D. JamesKid says to me, "You play baseball? What position? Left out?" and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is only one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put it that way, the comment loses it's importance.
Jodi PicoultWhat we do know is that the planet is going from 7 billion people today to 9 billion. More people want to live like us, drive American- size cars, live in an American-size home, and eat American-size Big Macs. What does that mean? It means that energy demand is going to be going up.
Thomas FriedmanNever pass up an opportunity to speak a kind word of appreciation. There are six billion people on the planet, and 5.9 billion of them go to bed every night starving for one honest word of appreciation.
Matthew KellyI'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 ChanRemember Donald Trump had about $4 billion worth of free media, and Hillary Clinton has had about $2 billion, and we've had zero. I think it remarkable that we are standing where we are.
Jill SteinThere is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine ... been here 4 1/2 billion years. We've been here, what, a 100,000 years, maybe 200,000. And we've only been engaged in heavy industry a little over 200 years. 200 years versus 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat? The planet isn't going away. We are.
George CarlinSomebody's buying these treasury bills at 1/20th of one percent. Consuming about $2 billion a day of goods and services beyond what we're producing. In other words, the rest of the world sends about $2 billion a day net of something.We got to send them something in return, don't we. So we send them little pieces of paper.
Warren BuffettHereโs a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?
Jaron LanierInstead of ending U.S. military aid to the 23rd wealthiest country to use for its consistent violations of international law and human rights, we see the Obama administration escalating the annual amount of aid, so that Israel will now start each year with almost $4 billion, with $3.8 billion a year of military aid coming from our tax money to support its military, without any restrictions on how it makes - how it uses that money, what weapons in the U.S. it's able to buy.
Phyllis BennisThe condition in New Orleans was changing every day. I said, why don't we appropriate another $10 billion, come back and look at the situation, and do another $10 billion every week, or every 10 days?
Lynn WestmorelandI said we are going to balance an $11 billion budget deficit in a $29 billion budget, so by percentage, the largest budget deficit in America, by percentage, larger than California, larger than New York, larger than Illinois. And we're going to balance that without raising taxes on the people of the state of New Jersey.
Chris ChristieDuring the fiscal year ending in 1861, expenses of the federal government had been $67 million. After the first year of armed conflict they were $475 million and, by 1865, had risen to one billion, three-hundred million dollars. On the income side of the ledger, taxes covered only about eleven per cent of that figure. By the end of the war, the deficit had risen to $2.61 billion. That money had to come from somewhere.
G. Edward GriffinOur galaxy is 10 billion years old. The Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. We are a firefly flicker in the great astrobiology of the galaxy.
Geoffrey MarcyOf course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.
John PolkinghorneFacebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can't figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're unlikely to ever do.
David Heinemeier HanssonIn the Iowa senate, I helped pass the largest tax cut in state history - returning over four billion dollars in savings and putting more money back in the pockets of hard-working Iowa families.
Joni ErnstI 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 RutanThe United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.
John PerkinsThe 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'ConnorYou got guys that are so old, you see them eating lunch, the drool's just coming from their mouth, and they're sending around memos about 10 percent crosscuts. If I had one tenth of their money, I would be free. They don't know what freedom is. It's a disease. You're one of the rare people that is given freedom, and what do you do with it? You don't live. You choose to be dead in life. Money buys freedom. I mean why is this guy with the slobber worried about taking food off other people's tables? His $19 billion won't get him from where he is to the grave comfortably? That to me is a disease.
Nick ToschesThere are 1.3 billion people today who have no access to electricity. Many of them rely on kerosene lanterns for light, but kerosene is both expensive and hazardous to the health.
Olafur EliassonOrganic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per-billion of pesticide residues
Jim HightowerCan anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.
Alan CorenThe reality is that there are half a billion kids in India, in villages, who have a pre-determined life. If they're very lucky and they're a gifted athlete, maybe they can compete for the Olympics, or maybe they can get into the military. But if you're not a gifted athlete, then you're going to end up working for your family and you're going to perpetuate what your family is. It's gotten to the point, in villages, where there's no hope. And the first spark of hope is when you ask yourself the question,"What gift did God give me that I can develop and use to better my life?"
J. B. BernsteinInstead of basic roads and bridges, infrastructure spending will go to bloated unions overseeing pie-in-the-sky construction projects like the $30 billion-plus high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which California officials fully expect to be funded.
Michelle MalkinA billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300 million years ago in its march toward greater diversity - all these "losses" and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."
Leonard SweetThe billion people who wake up every day trying to figure out if they have enough food to eat won't be at Davos.
Bill GatesOK, so here's the deal. First of all, "The Wall Street Journal" was bought for $5 billion. It's now worth $500 million, OK. They don't have to tell me what to do. "The Wall Street Journal" has been wrong so many different times about so many different things. I am all for free trade, but it's got to be fair. When Ford moves their massive plant to Mexico, we get nothing. We lose all of these jobs.
Donald TrumpAccording to, for example, one academic by the name of Philip Harvey, whose expertise is basically how do we create a New Deal, today. According to his estimate, these jobs could be created for far less than the [Barack] Obama stimulus package, which cost, you know, $700 or $800 billion, something like that, and produced around 3 million jobs - not a lot. According to his estimates, it would cost less to produce two-thirds of 20 million.
Jill SteinSomeone is an ignoramus who would say that, 'Oh, we had three hurricanes this year. This proves that somehow the climate is warming.' The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and you're going to say that we had four hurricanes and so it proves a theory?
Rand PaulEarth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.
Douglas CouplandWhen I write stuff and I help cast it, I turn away good people all the time. I may turn them down because this one's too tall and that one doesn't have a high enough voice or this one looks to old to match up with that one - there's a billion reasons not to hire somebody.
Harvey FiersteinIf we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.
David SuzukiA man may daydream of how he would spend a million dollars, but playing the same game with a billion dollars sours the fantasy. There are too many possibilities. The house he once wished for with all his heart is suddenly too small. The travel, too cheap. He wanted to visit an island. Now he contemplates buying one.
Holly BlackThe Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.
James Lovelock