Kilometres Versus Quotes & Sayings

The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A — Bill Bryson

The average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour. — Bill Bryson

Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself. — Mordecai Richler

That hemisphere of the moon which faces us is better known than the earth itself; its vast desert plains have been surveyed to within a few acres; its mountains and craters have been measured to within a few yards; while on the earth's surface there are 30,000,000 square kilometres (sixty times the extent of France), upon which the foot of man has never trod, which the eye of man has never seen. — Camille Flammarion

Australian seafarers make an important contribution to national security in a country with thousands of kilometres of uninhabited coastline. — Anthony Albanese

The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second. — Kip S. Thorne

Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body. — Christophe Galfard

It's only now, when a few thousand kilometres will insulate us against deceit, lies and underhandedness and we very probably won't see each other for a long time, that I feel really close to you once more. Only far away from you am I really at home with myself, only far away from you can I dare to open my heart without losing myself. — Alex Capus

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.) — Bill Bryson

We go up just into space - space is most commonly accepted to be 100 kilometres above the earth's surface, and we go up just beyond that to about 350,000 ft. — David Mackay

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away. So — Bill Bryson

What I'm asking people to do is to look at their lives, wherever they may be. I mean, you may be a housewife or a mother in Gauteng and you're driving your kid to school, you know, and you've got one kid in the back and you're driving 30 kilometres to school and 30 kilometres back, so 60 kilometres in a day, to take one child to school. Is there a possibility that you can put a few more kids, some friends' kids in the car, and start saving on those types of things? — Lewis Pugh

Sarah's father's shoulders began to shake. Tears poured down his cheeks. He took first one hand, and then the other, off the steering wheel to mop his eyes. He drove, weeping and groaning, at 140 kilometres an hour. Sarah's mother would not look at him. Sarah and Saffron stared, dumbstruck. Then it gradually dawned on them that he was laughing. — Hilary McKay

The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earth's surface - and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanov's blood. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long. — Anna Funder

When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: 'I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.' They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One — Richard Fortey

If your body is crying out for a change, or crying out that it's unhappy, for goodness sake listen to it. Our bodies aren't machines that get by with a grease and oil change every 50,000 kilometres. Stress is part of life but if prolonged stress is in our life, we have to ask ourselves if we are in the right place, right frame of mind, or doing the right job. — Simon McKeon

I think you have to play your own game and sometimes people don't realise that the play-maker runs the most kilometres on the pitch! — Rafael Van Der Vaart

In France, at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres ... If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need? — Frei Otto

In a field hospital, some ten kilometres behind the lines, Marius lay dying. For three days he had been dying and it was disturbing to the other patients. — Ellen N. La Motte

The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn't so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom — Bill Bryson

I have maybe a half-hour before the next surgery. Want to go and get a cup of coffee?
What I want is to meander eight kilometres down the canals with you from Kirov to your Fifth Soviet door. I want to get on the tram with you, the bus with you, sit in the Italian Gardens with you. That is what I want. I will take the cup of coffee in your hospital cafeteria. — Paullina Simons

It was very difficult to control the descent. At a height of seven kilometres, I catapulted out of my capsule and parachuted down to Earth. I was very familiar with parachutes because I was a sky diver before. — Valentina Tereshkova

The ability of human beings to be creative depends fundamentally on the health and well-being of our biosphere, the few kilometres of air, water, and soil that surround our planet like the skin of an apple. Quite simply, they are the physical and spiritual bases of our lives, and the only source of materials and tools ... — Freeman Patterson

Indian Ballistic Missile Defence Programme is an initiative to develop and deploy a multi-layered ballistic missile defence system to protect from ballistic missile attacks. Introduced in light of the ballistic missile threat from Pakistan and China, it is a double-tiered system consisting of two interceptor missiles, namely the Prithvi Air Defence (PAD) missile for high altitude interception, and the Advanced Air Defence (AAD) Missile for lower altitude interception. The two-tiered shield should be able to intercept any incoming missile launched 5,000 kilometres away. India became the fourth country to have — SABARINATHAN. K

In the reign of Shulgi a wall had been built across the country, more than 250 kilometres long, to keep them out. It was called 'a wall to keep out the Martu'. Shulgi's second successor ordered it to be rebuilt and strengthened, calling it Muriq-Tidnum, 'It Fends Off Tidnum.' But walls must end somewhere and enemies can often outflank them: in 1940 Hitler made the impregnable French Maginot Line irrelevant by sending his tanks through the forest of the Ardennes. And so it was with Muriq-Tidnum. — Paul Kriwaczek

For kilometres on end the road was totally jammed with vehicles drawn up three or four abreast - petrol tankers, ammunition trucks, teams of horses,ambulances. It was impossible to move forwards or back. Russian combat aircraft now arrived in wave after wave, and threw bombs into that unprotected, inextricable mass. This is what hell must be like. — Christopher Duffy

You must go deeper into Russia - 150 kilometres from Moscow or more, and look there. The kids are fed with cattle feed - people don't get paid for half a year. — Aleksandr Lebed

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year. As the kilometres wound — Gregory David Roberts