1 In A Billion Quotes & Sayings

The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century.9 — Steven Pinker

The war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons than planned. Since the alliance, France had advanced to the Americans over 100 million livres, about $25 million, in loans, supplies and gifts, and before it was over the cost of the American war for France would amount, by some estimates, to 1.5 billion livres, a historic sum that was virtually to bankrupt the French national budget and require the summoning of the Estates General in 1789 that led to the arrest of the King and the sequence of eruptions that became the French Revolution. — Barbara W. Tuchman

China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot. — Lee Kuan Yew

Eric Daniels, the boss at Lloyds TSB for example, was paid less than Goggin in 2007 despite delivering three and a half times Bank of Ireland's profits that year. Goggins' total package was 50 percent more than that of Andy Hornby of HBOS, who collected €2.6 million in 2007. The Scottish giant made €6.988 billion that year compared to Bank of Ireland's €1.584 billion. — Shane Ross

Food for thought....

It took the earths population thousands of years (from early dawn of mankind to early 1800) to reach 1 billion people.
Then astoundingly, it took only 100 years to double it to 2 billion in 1920.
After that, it merely took 50 years for the population to double again to 4 billion in 1970's.
Today, we are on track to reach 8 billion.

Just today, the human race added a quarter million people (250,000) to the human race. And this happens every day- rain or shine. — Dan Brown

There is $1.4 billion a day in trade that goes back and forth across the border. That means millions of jobs and livelihoods for families here in Canada and for families in the United States. — Paul Cellucci

another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation - from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war. — Richard Rhodes

The world is a challenging place in terms of wars and peace, basic human rights and freedoms. The Holy Father has a major role to play in global affairs. The pope is more than a spiritual leader. For the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, he is an inspiration of holiness and goodness and, above all, the faithful proclamation of the Gospel. — Chris Smith

Universe is almost incompatible with life - or at least what we understand as necessary for life: Even if every star in a hundred billion galaxies had an Earthlike planet, without heroic technological measures life could prosper in only about 10-37 the volume of the Universe. For clarity, let's write it out: only 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 of our universe is hospitable to life. Thirty-six zeroes before the one. The rest is cold, radiation-riddled black vacuum. — Carl Sagan

For every $1 billion we invest in public transportation, we create 30,000 jobs, save thousands of dollars a year for each commuter, and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. — Bernie Sanders

he later made the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related illnesses. The case (immortalized in the film The Insider) made Scruggs a rich man. His fee in the tobacco class action is said to have been $1.4 billion, or $22,500 for every hour his law firm worked. — Niall Ferguson

To date, there is no strong empirical support for claims that automating medical record keeping will lead to major reductions in health-care costs or significant improvements in the well-being of patients. But if doctors and patients have seen few benefits from the scramble to automate record keeping, the companies that supply the systems have profited. Cerner Corporation, a medical software outfit, saw its revenues triple, from $1 billion to $3 billion, between 2005 and 2013. Cerner, as it happens, was one of five corporations that provided RAND with funding for the original 2005 study. The other sponsors, which included General Electric and Hewlett Packard, also have substantial business interests in health-care automation. As today's flawed systems are replaced or upgraded in the future, to fix their interoperability problems and other shortcomings, information technology companies will reap further windfalls. — Nicholas Carr

I was living in a house with five guys, eating their leftovers when they weren't watching. I went from that to having $1-billion-plus on paper. — Jeffrey Skoll

The Holy Father held a special place in the hearts of more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide. — Todd Akin

Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history. — Julian Assange

With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity. — Ben Parr

Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government's true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs - which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan - carved out a reported $300 million in fees. — Michael Lewis

The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith. No investment bank owned by its employees would have leveraged itself 35:1, or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine CDOs. — Michael Lewis

In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know how
high is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, in
China there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3
billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world is
a small village, with how many morons should we have to come
to terms on the territory of this stupid planet. It's the same the
world over, or the world is the same wherever you go! — Carl William Brown

If some Western politician claims he is in a position to use the normal Western methods to feed and clothe 1.2 billion Chinese, we would be happily prepared to elect him president of China. — Li Peng

since the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve almost a century ago, we have printed roughly $800 billion from 1913 to 2007. But in 2013, the Fed printed more new money than that in just one year (see Figure 1.1) and will likely do the same in 2014. That's more money printing in one year than in nearly 100 years! — Robert A. Wiedemer

Women spend 80 cents of every dollar in the marketplace. We could be the most powerful force for economic and environmental change in the 21st century if we focused our money where it could make the biggest difference. If a million people did that, it would have a $1 billion impact. — Diane MacEachern

Government barriers on Business For example, the Endangered Species Act prevents 'disturbing the habitat' of the spotted owl. That has restricted 4.2 million acres of forest from development, leading to the loss of 30,000 lumber-related jobs and the annual loss of 1.1 billion board feet of lumber. This has driven up the cost of houses by at least $4,000 each. In addition, regulators ordered a Kansas City bank to install a Braille keypad on its drive-through automatic teller machine, presumably to aid any blind drivers. The list goes on and on. — Rush Limbaugh

But these days, there's also a strong economic argument for doing away with capital punishment. With California facing its most severe fiscal crisis in recent memory ... it would be crazy not to consider the fact that it will add as much as $1 billion over the next five years simply to keep the death penalty on the books. — John Van De Kamp

Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained - 80% of the company - were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he'd made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the New York Times that the money did not mean much to him. "There's no yacht in my future," he said. "I've never done this for the money. — Walter Isaacson

India made a big mistake by signing up to TRIPS. With a population of 1.3 billion, India can't afford a monopoly in healthcare. Monopolies lead to higher prices and we can't allow them in a country like India with so much poverty and misery. It was like signing our own death warrant. — Yusuf Hamied

A $1.7 billion average increase in electricity costs is estimated to result in a $1.3 billion decrease in personal income and a loss of 13,000 more jobs in the region. — Greg Walden

Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products - known as "Mr. Credit-Default Swap" - led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees - including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment. Neither — Sebastian Junger

The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon's mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A 2011 study by the Pentagon found that during the ten years after 9/11, the Defense Department had given more than $400 billion to contractors who had previously been sanctioned in cases involving $1 million or more in fraud. — James Risen

The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks. — Fritjof Capra

India's democracy where over 1 billion people have a voice in deciding their future is a world example of how governance can incorporate diversity into a movement for inclusive growth. New modes of democratic engagement, especially through using e-governance are allowing greater access to fundamental rights for all our people. — Narendra Modi

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in a hundred. But here we are talking about odds of one in a billion. And yet . . . even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one. — Richard Dawkins

There 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 Carlin

Almost half the world - over three billion people - live on less than $2.50 a day. 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to clean water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Let those facts sink in for just a moment ... and slowly allow gratitude and a desire to become part of the solution find a place in your heart. — Joshua Becker

In an era of billion-person countries and trillion-pound economies, we need to find ways to amplify our voice. We are most likely to be heard when the Chinese negotiate with a £10 trillion E.U., not a £1.5 trillion Britain. — Douglas Alexander

Revenues were, according to well-informed sources, more than $550 million for 2009 - up from less than $300 million in 2008. That represents a stunning growth rate of almost 100 percent. The same sources say that the company could exceed $1 billion in revenue in 2010. — David Kirkpatrick

Uber, which raised $1.2 billion this month at a valuation of $40 billion, said in August it had sought a legal opinion and that its Seoul service obeys the law. Opposition to its operations is down to outdated regulations that precede smartphone and wireless technology, Allen Penn, the company's head of Asia, told reporters at the time. Paid transportation with unregistered vehicles is "clearly illegal activity," South Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said later that month. The maximum penalty for Uber's alleged legal violation is a two-year prison sentence or a fine of nearly $20,000, Yonhap News reported Wednesday. — Anonymous

In matters of potential suffering, a single 200,000 years old human being stood against a 550 million years old octopus - acutely aware of its suffering, yet unable to do much to alleviate its misery - is the structural equivalent of comparing the convoluted majesty of the International Space Station to a child's paper and stick kite, and to then stand the octopus against the far more ancient 1.5 billion years old protozoa is to weigh the complexity of the kite to a dust mote caught up in a lazy afternoon breeze. — John Zande

There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. If there are half a billion Chinese Christians fifty years from now, that will change the course of human history.6 In most cases, the Christianity that is growing is not the more secularized, belief-thin versions predicted by the sociologists. Rather, it is a robust supernaturalist kind of faith, with belief in miracles, Scriptural authority, and personal conversion. — Timothy Keller

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick. — P. J. O'Rourke

We live in a quick-fix society where we need instant gratification for everything. Too fat? Get lipo-sucked. Stringy hair? Glue on extensions. Wrinkles and lines? Head to the beauty shop for a pot of the latest miracle skin stuff. It's all a beautiful £1 billion con foisted upon insecure women by canny cosmetic conglomerates. — Joan Collins

The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid. — Joseph Stiglitz

Even as Ramadan holds profound meaning for the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, it is also a reminder to people of all faiths of our common humanity and the commitment to justice, equality, and compassion shared by all great faiths. In that spirit, I wish Muslims across America and around the world a blessed month, and I look forward to again hosting an iftar dinner here at the White House. Ramadan Kareem. — Barack Obama

Out of the 1.2 billion people in India, one-third of them are between the age of 1-14 and by 2030, India will have a dynamic and youthful workforce of about 700 million with an average age of 35. This is expected to constitute a substantial proportion of world's workforce. — Vayalar Ravi

Christianity's growth, especially in the developing world, has been explosive. There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. If there are half a billion Chinese Christians fifty years from now, that will change the course of human history.6 — Timothy J. Keller

Blackwater USA has already taken in more than $1 billion from the public coffers. All in all, that's not a bad take for Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a Naval Academy dropout who served less time under the colors of the nation, in uniform, than my most recent pair of boots. — Robert Bateman

A major change is afoot as we combine both WPZ and Access into the large scale natural gas infrastructure MLP. And the team here at WPZ is very energized right now as we're on the verge of a major $1 billion boost in our annual cash flows that we expect to come from three major projects Geismar, Gulfstar and the Keathley Canyon Connector all of which have reached the commissioning stage here in the fourth quarter. — Alan Armstrong

Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies. — Daniel Yergin

Then, when the Fed's fire hoses started spraying an elephant soup of liquidity injections in every direction and its balance sheet grew by $1.3 trillion in just thirteen weeks compared to $850 billion during its first ninety-four years, I became convinced that the Fed was flying by the seat of its pants, making it up as it went along. It was evident that its aim was to stop the hissy fit on Wall Street and that the thread of a Great Depression 2.0 was just a cover story for a panicked spree of money printing that exceeded any other episode in recorded human history. — David Stockman

We live on the thin skin of a planet that rotates at about a thousand miles an hour, travels sixty-six thousand miles an hour around a gigantic gas fire, in a galaxy of a billion more wild fires moving at 1.3 trillion miles an hour across a barely comprehendible Universe. Forget the mission of the Starship Enterprise; we are unwitting galactic explorers traveling into uncharted territory at terrifying speed in every second of our existence. Cataclysmic events can happen at any moment. — Larry J. Dunlap

In 2008, Goldman Sachs only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department. — Bernie Sanders

Taken as a whole, the last four administrations represent the culmination of a century of executive abuse. With each successive president from forty-one to forty-four the disease grew worse. By the time Obama leaves office in 2017, Americans will have suffered under twenty-eight consecutive years of unconstitutional executive usurpation of power. An elected king? The British taxpayer spends around $50 million annually to support the entire royal family. With an annual budget that exceeds $1 billion for expenses, including travel, the American president supplanted the British monarch in everything but a title long ago. — Brion McClanahan

We'll get a chance to go through this [Apple versus Microsoft debate] again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. — Steve Ballmer

The bill then says if the Senate does not act, then H.R. 1 (the House-passed bill that cuts $61 billion) will be the law of the land. In addition to that, it says that if all else fails, and the Senate brings about a shutdown, then members should not get their pay. — Eric Cantor

Restaurant industry sales in 2011 are estimated to have reached a record high of $604 billion, up 3.6 percent from 2010. Restaurant employment grew 1.9 percent in 2011, with some 230,000 jobs added, the strongest gain in five years. — David Sax

What's interesting is that most free-marketers don't seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that's trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar - that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations - with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools. — Steve Bivans

I told President Obama he was about to buy a helicopter that in several respects was not as good as what he already had, that each would cost between $500 million and $1 billion - but that he could microwave a meal on it in the middle of a nuclear attack. As I expected, he thought the whole thing was a pretty bad idea. — Robert M. Gates

In the early 1990s, Donald Trump was nearly $1 billion in debt personally and $9 billion in debt corporately. An interviewer asked him if he was worried. He replied, "Worrying is a waste of time. Worrying gets in my way of working to solve these problems. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

In addition, California spends nearly $1 billion a year in Medi-Cal services for an average of 780,000 illegal immigrants a month, over and above emergency health services. — Elton Gallegly

Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley workstation maker, got its start in 1982 making such machines for use on the Stanford University Network (hence its name). Sun set a record that still stands in the annals of American business for being the company that from a dead start reached the $1 billion sales mark faster than any other manufacturer - it took all of four years. — Brent Schlender

There are 1.3 billion human beings in the world who subsist on less than a dollar a day and have yet to make their first phone call, let alone send an email. Is — Francis Wheen

Culture is a powerful force that influences our perceptions, our mindsets and even our domestic and foreign policies. The rich, messy complexity of 1,400 years of Islamic civilization and 1.6 billion Muslims has been reduced to token stereotypes. We are either avatars of destruction or the good Muslim who helps the national security narrative. But the overwhelming majority of us live in the giant middle - the grey zone - where impressions exist in more colors than just black and white." * — Rabia Chaudry

The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world's population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995.3 The 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, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the planet.4 — John Perkins

In a world of plenty, no one, not a single person, should go hungry. But almost 1 billion still do not have enough to eat. I want to see an end to hunger everywhere within my lifetime. — Ban Ki-moon

You cannot expect so much freedom in a land of 1.3 billion people. — Alex Chiu

In early July, Morgan Stanley received its first wake-up call. It came from Greg Lippmann and his bosses at Deutsche Bank, who, in a conference call, told Howie Hubler and his bosses that the $4 billion in credit default swaps Hubler had sold Deutsche Bank's CDO desk six months earlier had moved in Deutsche Bank's favor. Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day? Or, as Lippmann actually put it - according to someone who heard the exchange - Dude, you owe us one point two billion. — Michael Lewis

The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn't even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals. You're supporting vast inefficiency and pushing up the price of food for the poorest in the world, — Jonathan Safran Foer

The original capital cost (i.e. actual value) of the Barts Health PFI was £1.1 billion (around £1 million per bed) but will end up costing £7.1 billion by 2049.14 £6 billion will go to the PFI consortium Skanska Innisfree and partners. Barts Health are paying £100 million a year in interest before they even see a patient.15 That's £3 billion, just in interest, over 30 years. Imagine what you could do for healthcare in East London with this money. So — Youssef El-Gingihy

Income tax rules also made borrowing against a home's equity attractive. Because mortgage interest payments can be deducted for income tax purposes, the interest paid on home equity loans could also be deducted, although interest on credit card debt or other debt was not deductible. Therefore it often paid anyone with any other kind of debt to pay off that debt with a home equity loan, whose interest would be deductible for income tax purposes. More and more people began to do this during the housing boom. In 2003, home equity loans totaled $593 billion. Such loans soared during the housing boom, nearly doubling to $1.13 trillion in 2007. — Thomas Sowell

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If, for the sake of argument, 1 million are violent, that's a mere .000625 percent of them. I wonder who among you wants to be judged on such a tiny minority. Further, at 1.6 billion, if all Muslims - or even most Muslims - were violent, the world would already be in flames. Most people simply want to live their lives in peace, with some degree of material comfort. I find it bizarre - and disturbing - that so many Americans imagine that being a Muslim somehow trumps human nature and makes ordinary simple people want to rise up and kill everyone. That takes a special kind of stupid. — Dave Champion

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it's always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it's hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you'll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero. — Peter Thiel

Food now represents the single largest component of municipal solid waste brought to landfills, where it also releases methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And if that weren't enough, it costs Americans $1.5 billion a year just to dispose of the wasted food.17 The impacts of food waste are not limited to the United States, however. The footprint of food that is lost or wasted across the globe is estimated as follows. 28 percent of all agricultural land - an area larger than Canada18 38 times the volume of water used by all U.S. households19 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent; if it were a country, uneaten food would be third in its greenhouse gas footprint, after the United States and China20 — Dana Gunders

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump - a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. — Naomi Klein

in 2008, shortly after being elected President, Barack Obama demonstrated to many academics and doctors that he had a clear understanding of the deep problems in health care, by committing to spend $1 billion on head-to-head trials of commonly used treatments, in order to find out which is best. In return he was derided by right-wing critics as 'anti-industry'. — Ben Goldacre

You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phones. — Steve Ballmer

Soccer must play a socio-cultural role. We reach 1.6 billion people, thanks to the positive emotions that soccer triggers, FIFA is more influential than any country on Earth and any religion. We move masses. We want to use that to create more peace, justice and health in the world. — Pope Francis

Look 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 Brzezinski

1. Investors give fund managers money at the wrong time. Now that you've had some time to read this book and understand the importance of buying stocks during fear cycles and holding during greed cycles, this first indicator should make sense. To understand this principle, imagine that you're the fund manager of a $100 billion investment fund. When the stock market crashes and you're able to purchase severely undervalued businesses with minimal debt, not only do you lack funds to invest, but all your resources are being depleted by scared investors. Instead of receiving money to buy the great deals, your investors are selling their shares in the fund and you don't have the capacity to take advantage of the market behavior. This reason alone severely handicaps fund managers as they attempt to beat the market. — Preston G. Pysh

One 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. Kennedy

In May 2012 - a year after the Arab awakening erupted - the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt's military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid? — Thomas L. Friedman

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's (Christian) universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison. — Sam Harris

If you're picturing Farmer Juan and his family gratefully wiping sweat from their brows when you buy that Ecuadorian banana, picture this instead: the CEO of Dole Inc. in his air-conditioned office in Westlake Village, California. He's worth $1.4 billion; Juan gets about $6 a day. Much money is made in the global reshuffling of food, but the main beneficiaries are processors, brokers, shippers, supermakets, and oil companies. — Steven L. Hopp

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot account for the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 million cells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life. — Gerald Fischbach

The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won't keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky. — Bill Bryson

Do the math. America allows about one million two hundred thousand abortions per year. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the average cost of an abortion in 2001, the last year for which data was provided by aborters, was $468.00, so by now the average cost exceeds $600. Multiply the number of abortions times the costs of an abortion. That exercise will yield a total of 'blood money' every year in America of close to a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000.00). — John Price

Let's define a Crapitalist: A well-connected friend of the powers that be who scores big bucks at taxpayer expense. From bagging millions in tax dollars for phony "green energy" companies that go bust, to vacuuming public coffers to build glitzy sports stadiums, to utilizing little-known tax credit loopholes to loot $1.5 billion a year for Hollywood movies - Crapitalists know how to use every trick to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Rather than playing and winning in the rough-and-tumble world of business competition, Crapitalists use government to rig the game in their favor and leave you and me - the taxpayers - holding the bill. These corporate sissies know their ideas suck, so they try to stack the deck to privatize their profits and socialize their losses.
And there's the rub: crony capitalism is socialism's Trojan horse. — Jason Mattera

So you're an environmentalist; why are you killing a distant river with every bite? "Energy-intensive US factory farms generated 1.4 billion tons of animal waste in 1996, which ... pollutes American waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. — Anonymous

We are spending $1 billion a week in Iraq. — Tom Allen