The First Million Quotes & Sayings

You are beyond frustrating," she grumbled. "Why can't you do what I ask you to do without issuing a million questions first?"
"I could say the same of you."
"I don't
Argh." She raised a fist at him. "So maybe I do ask a lot of questions. So what. Anyone in my position would do the same. Besides, I'm a girl and that's my job. You're a boy. You're supposed to pound your chest with your fists and grunt, then do everything in your power to please me."
"Hardly. The man you just described is more likely to knock you over the head with a club and drag you away by the hair."
-Annabelle and Zacharel — Gena Showalter

Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of ambitious fish - something like the modern mudskipper, which can hop from puddle to puddle during droughts - or even as a fully formed amphibian. In fact, the first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably much more like modern woodlice, sometimes also known as pillbugs or sow bugs. These are the little bugs (crustaceans, in fact) that are commonly thrown into confusion when you upturn a rock or log. — Bill Bryson

If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to 'Firefly', make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet. — Nathan Fillion

Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Cooper leaned forward and caressed my cheek. "You have a million walls up, baby. When I saw them the first time you walked into Spanish class, I told myself you were too much effort, but I was a fool. You're worth every ounce of trouble you give me."
"Oh, and I give you trouble as part of my devious plan?"
"No doubt about that. There's your finger. Here's me wrapped around it. — Bijou Hunter

There is now a $5 million dollar bounty on Osama bin Laden. Which marks the first time in history there has ever been a bounty on a guy's head who wears Bounty on his head. — Jay Leno

It's being reported that Google spent over $5 million on lobbying just during the first quarter of this year. You'd think Google wouldn't really need to lobby politicians. All they have to say is, 'We have your search history. Do what we tell you.' — Jimmy Fallon

Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically — Albert Speer

Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother's Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together - the moments when her child had been just like other people's. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone. — Jodi Picoult

When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my
first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the
subject. — Winston Churchill

Seven hundred thousand men are said to have perished in the first two expeditions, which had been thus commenced and carried on by the pious zeal of the Christian church, and in the total amount, several million were found numbered with the dead: the awful effects of religious fanaticism presuming upon the aid of heaven. — Elihu Palmer

I was like a wonder kid at Uptown. The first record I produced sold two million copies - and I'd only produced it because the producer didn't show up. — Sean Combs

The English team's revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party. — Bill Bryson

We are seeing at the Republican National Committee a phenomenon that is worth noting this week; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, we will have a million first time donors since the president took office. — Ed Gillespie

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War. — Chris Bohjalian

Cautiously, he moved further out, checking the roofs, doors, windows. Nothing. He walked out further, keeping against the wooden wall of a building, just in case. His heart was pounding in his ears. Strange, isn't it? You could be in hundreds of fights, but everyone always seemed like the first time. A million different things could happen, go completely wrong. Then it might well be his last. Where is he? Which building? — Christina Engela

The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre- Katrina New Orleans - below sea level and facing super-hurricanes. — Joseph J. Romm

Because here's the thing that's wrong with all of the "How to Be Happy" shit that's been shared eight million times on Facebook in the past few years - here's what nobody realizes about all of this crap: The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I'll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It's what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as "the backwards law" - the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The — Mark Manson

Take a typical three-hundred-million-dollar CMO. It would be divided into three tranches, or slices of a hundred million dollars each. Investors in each tranche received interest payments. But the owners of the first tranche received all principal repayments from all three hundred million dollars of mortgage bonds held in trust. Not until first tranche holders were entirely paid off did second tranche investors receive any prepayments. Not until both first and second tranche investors had been entirely paid off did the holder of a third tranche certificate receive prepayments. — Michael Lewis

The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from interconnectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion. — James Gleick

The first six million years had been all fun and games. — Alastair Reynolds

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town. — Michael Connelly

Lotto fever hit New York again this week, and like the old saying goes, 'You gotta be in it to win it' ... but first, you gotta have a dead end job so pathetic you're willing to kill five hours standing in line for a 1 in 25 million chance. — Dennis Miller

When the Earth was last four degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole. Global warming of this magnitude would eventually leave the whole planet without ice for the first time in nearly 40 million years. — Mark Lynas

I thought I'd be a journalist, and only pursued acting intermittently while studying. My very first interview as a journalist was with David Usher of Moist, and he called the magazine the next day to say it was the best interview he'd done for his solo album. I felt like a million euros. — Liane Balaban

There's an incomparable rush that comes from finding dinosaur bones. You know you're the first person to lay hands on a critter that lived 80 or 90 million years ago. — Jack Horner

There's something about that tunnel that leads to downtown. It's glorious at night. Just glorious. You start on one side of the mountain, and it's dark, and the radio is loud. As you enter the tunnel, the wind gets sucked away, and you squint from the lights overhead. When you adjust to the lights, you can see the other side in the distance just as the sound of the radio fades to nothing because the waves just can't reach. Then, you're in the middle of the tunnel, and everything becomes a calm dream. As you see the opening get closer, you just can't get there fast enough. And finally, just when you think you'll never get there, you see the opening right in front of you. And the radio comes back even louder than you remember it. And the wind is waiting. And you fly out of the tunnel onto the bridge. And there it is. The city. A million lights and buildings and everything seems as exciting as the first time you saw it. It really is a grand entrance. — Stephen Chbosky

The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first. — Erasmus Darwin

The population of the United Kingdom has, for the first time, reached sixty million. If they stood on each other's shoulders they would reach perhaps twenty feet in the air before toppling over. — Eddie Mair

There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour responses to surface viewed singly. — David Papineau

The opponents of my budget propose taking $200 million out of our classrooms and instead spending it on a larger school employee pay raise. Our focus should be on making sure our children come first. — Bob Riley

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something - give you something! - and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get! — Sinclair Lewis

If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch. — Loren Eiseley

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the huge industry simply melted away. — Nicholas Carr

You know, it was once said of the first George Bush that he was born on third base and thought he'd hit a triple. Well, with the 22 million new jobs and the budget surplus Bill Clinton left behind, George W. Bush came into office on third base, and then he stole second. — Ted Strickland

A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveller from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveller invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus affair had recently led to a massive outbreak of virulent popular antisemitism. Or might it be Russia, where the Tsarist 'Black Hundreds' had been massacring large numbers of Jews in the wake if the failed Revolution of 1905. That Germany, with its highly acculturated Jewish community and its comparitive lack of overt or violent political antisemitism, would be the nation to launch this exterminatory campaign would hardly have occurred to him. — Richard J. Evans

Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion "natives." The first possessed the Word, the others borrowed it. — Frantz Fanon

I wanted him to meet Ainsley. She was super important to me. I made my decision. "I...I would like that."
Rider's reaction was immediate. He smiled and the dimple appeared. My breath caught. I'd actually invited Rider along to meet Ainsley. I wanted that. Really wanted that, but I had no idea what to do with that.
Regardless, excitement hummed through me. Hanging out with Rider and Ainsley was normal. Something a million people probably did every day, because they were actually living life, but it was a first for me - a huge first. It was my best friend and it was the guy...the guy who'd been my best friend and who now, despite everything, felt like something deeper, richer and more intricate, hanging out together.
It felt important. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

The poor, no less than the rich, stay tuned in to the Dream Machine in bad times as well as good ... By 1995, millions of the poor were left without housing, medical care; jobs, or educational opportunity; six million children-one of every four kids under 6 years of age in America-were officially poor. Mired in Third-World conditions of poverty while video-bombarded with First-World dreams, rarely has a population suffered a greater gap between socially cultivated appetites and socially available opportunities. — Charles Derber

The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards. — G.K. Chesterton

IF WE FIRST APPEAR IN THE PLEISTOCENE, I THINK THIS IS WHEN WE DISAPPEAR - I GUESS A MILLION YEARS OF MAN IS ENOUGH — John Irving

They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire!

There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library...

And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had! — Avijeet Das

Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear - that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs. — Douglas Coupland

But the events that transpired on those various dates did not throw the city of Moscow into upheaval. When the page was torn from the calendar, the bedroom windows did not suddenly shine with the light of a million electric lamps; that Fatherly gaze did not suddenly hang over every desk and appear in every dream; nor did the drivers of a hundred Black Marias turn the keys in their ignitions and fan out into the shadowy streets. For the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, Bukharin's fall from grace, and the expansion of the Criminal Code to allow the arrest of anyone even countenancing dissension, these were only tidings, omens, underpinnings. And it would be a decade before their effects were fully felt. No. — Amor Towles

The morning sun burned away the mist so the valley below is now clear. The scope of what I see drowns out every other sense: There's no river, no water. Instead, hundreds of feet below the bridge the ground shifts and writhes. At first I think maybe it's a field of some sort but then individual colors begin to pull apart.
And all at once I understand what it is. Like a river flooding its banks, the entire valley is full of Mudo. The sound is not that of a raging waterfall but the pounding of two hundred million feet. The moans of a hundred million mouths. They pour through the valley, more people than I have ever seen. More people than I ever thought could have existed in one world. And they sense me, reach for me but are trapped by the mountains. — Carrie Ryan

And did you know that Valentine's Day originally started when this emperor like a million years ago made marriage illegal because he thought it made soldiers weak? This priest - Valentine - married people in secret anyway, and he ended up having his head cut off because of it. So the first Valentine was some guy's head. There's some history for you.
It's sort of perfect, when you think about it. Isn't falling in love a lot like losing your head? — Michael Thomas Ford

This is Wall Street, and today is important. Because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars
an excitingday in a man's life. The enterprise was slightly illegal. — Abraham Polonsky

The truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes, or under other horrific conditions and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children. And though at first glance that looks like a big number, 2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians. The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left. — Katie J. Davis

In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden - a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants. — Diane Ackerman

The usual people tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA , then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all. — Douglas Adams

If we are going to solve the challenges we face, you need a President who will pursue genuine solutions day in and day out. And that is my commitment to you. We need immigration reform that will secure our borders, and punish employers who exploit immigrant labor; reform that finally brings the 12 million people who are here illegally out of the shadows by requiring them to take steps to become legal citizens. We must assert our values and reconcile our principles as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. That is a priority I will pursue from my very first day. — Barack Obama

Should we attempt border security first, which I believe we should, we still need to face the fact that comprehensive reform is necessary. This must include a guest worker program and dealing with the 11 million people who are here today that are contributing to our economy. — Jim Costa

The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks. Yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities, food surpluses and improved transportation were not enough. The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war. And if no agreement can be reached, strife spreads, even if the storehouses are bulging. It was not food shortages that caused most of history's wars and revolutions. The — Yuval Noah Harari

Well, first of all, you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives you are given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character. — Viola Davis

This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement, — Newt Gingrich

The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying. — Scott Anderson

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered. — V.S. Naipaul

The pill" was first approved for prescription use in the United States in June 1960. By 1967, an estimated five million American women were taking the pills every month.4 — Nancy Howell Lee

the gold standard was incapable of preventing the sort of financial booms and busts that were, and continue to be, such a feature of the economic landscape. These bubbles and crises seem to be deep-rooted in human nature and inherent to the capitalist system. By one count there have been sixty different crises since the early seventeenth century - the first documented bank panic can, however, be dated to A.D. 33 when the Emperor Tiberius had to inject one million gold pieces of public money into the Roman financial system to keep it from collapsing. — Liaquat Ahamed

Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man. — Albert Speer

In 1803, President Jefferson oversaw the purchase of this land from the French for $15 million. It doesn't sound like much for an area three times the size of France itself but given that they'd stolen it from the Native Americans in the first place, I suppose they couldn't grumble. Once some debts had been wiped and estate agents had taken their commission, Napoleon's France ended up pocketing a little more than $8 million. Which is about how much it cost Pepsi Cola to secure the services of Britney Spears. Times have changed. — Dave Gorman

If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days - something over three years - to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you would be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America's national debt). That is what $1 trillion is. — Bill Bryson

To a normal person, $10 million will seem like enough. But anyone who thinks that's enough is not the type that can acquire that much in the first place. — James K. Glassman

Never dress down for the poor. They won't respect you for it. They want their First Lady to look like a million dollars. — Imelda Marcos

They say John Kerry is the first Democratic presidential candidate in history to raise $50 million in a three-month period. Actually, that's nothing. He once raised $500 million with two words: 'I do.' — Jay Leno

Even then, none of the line's creators knew for sure how the line would be used. The biggest question about the line - Why? - remained imperfectly explored. All its creators knew was that the Wall Street people who wanted it wanted it very badly - and also wanted to find ways for others not to have it. In one of his first meetings with a big Wall Street firm, Spivey had told the firm's boss the price of his line: $10.6 million plus costs if he paid up front, $20 million or so if he paid in installments. The boss said he'd like to go away and think about it. He returned with a single question: Can you double the price? — Michael Lewis

If someone offered me a hundred million dollars to make a movie? I would first remind him that there are 850 million people in the world who don't have enough to eat. — Lloyd Kaufman

He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.
But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.
There would be no spring. ("The October Game") — Ray Bradbury

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. — Salman Rushdie

I was the kind of entrepreneur that never really felt I made it. When Mike Olefield's "Tubular Bells" [Virgin Records' first release] sold 8 or 10 million copies, I suppose, at age 19, I could've possibly retired on the money. Instead, I immediately pushed the boat and took that risk again. — Richard Branson

The name Atlantis came from an old book Victoria had never read. A lifetime residency in the ASM paradise was rumored to cost anywhere from 15 to 20 million dollars. The rich and powerful lived under the dome because they considered themselves separate and superior. Few of them left the comfort and security of Atlantis. To them the outside world was weak. Second Sector citizens where miscreant dregs of a defunct society. In order to enter the Atlantian dome one first had to be cleared by a resident. Gate security personnel strictly enforced this rule, even when outsiders carried a badge and gun. — Benjamin R. Smith

You'll find your one-in-a-million. But you're sharp enough to know there's no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him. — Kaye Gibbons

My fellow critics and I may occasionally fault a movie for departing, in detail or in spirit, from its literary source, but the grousing of a few adult pedants is nothing compared to the wrath of several million bookish 10-year-olds. Their presumed demands, and the hovering spirit of Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, inhibit this movie as it did the first Potter film. — A.O. Scott

Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses in Maryland and Cape Town and a fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. Most of the people over whom he rules live in extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of forty-nine and an infant mortality of eighty-seven per one thousand (this means that more than one child in twelve dies before its first birthday). — Peter Singer

You think you're paying your dollar for a chance at the $6.2 million jackpot on Saturday, but really you're paying for the pleasure of the car ride home, deciding which credit card to pay off first and where your kid will suddenly be able to go to college. — Kelly Braffet

Going public was a difficult decision, and I had misgivings. My subjective experience was now an objective fact in the wider world. It didn't belong to just me anymore - though I quickly learned that it hadn't belonged to just me in the first place. More than a million Americans and their families were going through the same thing; some openly, some in secret due to concerns of being misunderstood and marginalized. — Michael J. Fox

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. — Vernor Vinge

Just because there are celebrities in a movie, it doesn't mean anything. I don't think The Ant Bully did all that well the first week at the box office. Compare the movies that have a lot of celebrities with the Jimmy Neutron movie, which had no celebrity voices and grossed almost one hundred million dollars. — Rob Paulsen

Pickups, S.U.V.'s, vans and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting those should be our first priority. — Andy Grove

We've been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves.
We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God. — John Brunner

They both carried a million cracks beneath the skin. Even under the stark light of the fluorescents, it was hard to see which of them was more broken. But for the first time, she felt like she had to vanquish her mental illness not for herself but for someone else. Because she was broken with him, and if she fixed herself, maybe she could make him a little less broken, too. — Pam Godwin

Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the planet. The once-labeled 'Third World' is edging its way into the 'First World.' — Peter Blair Henry

The first million words are the hardest. — Francis Hamit

Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death," let alone, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die." Nor even, in a more authentic first-century Christian way, do they say, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised from the dead after the sleep of death." No. Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world's true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God's new creation has begun - and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven! To be sure, as early as Paul the resurrection of Jesus is firmly linked to the final resurrection of all God's people. — N. T. Wright

I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs. — Malcolm Wilson

During the first million years of its existence, mankind survived five apocalypses without succumbing to extinction. It endured the Apocalypse of Steel, the Apocalypse of Hydrogen, the Apocalypse of Serotonin, and both Apocalypses of Water, the second of which occurred despite certain contracts to the contrary. — Rachel Swirsky

I think food trucks are the new answer to American fast food. The idea of raising two or three million dollars and going through red tape to open a restaurant, there's lots of barriers to success. There's a really easy jumping place for food trucks. It's very hip and acceptable for new chefs to open a food truck first. — Tyler Florence

It hurts, right? It's messy and complicated and it's like a tattoo that never ends. A million needles inking something on your heart that isn't even beautiful."
"The feeling you have in that moment right as you wake up, before your brain mucks it all up with thoughts and words? That very first feeling is where the truth lives."
"Because love always wins. Always. — Emma Scott

Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil." "A which?" "Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years. — Mark Twain

During the first 3 years at Auschwitz, 2 million people died; over the next 2 years - 3 million. — Witold Pilecki

Mankind has always drawn from outside sources of energy. This island was the first to harness coal and steam. But our present sources stand in the ratio of a million to one, compared with any previous sources. The release of atomic energy will change the whole structure of society. — Frederick Soddy

You always hear about fashion's success stories. How a starlet lost an earring one night and by the next morning, the entire country was wearing one earring. Or how sweaters made a comeback in a drugstore, or a First Lady influenced how we dressed during her reign. But what about the losers? The fashions that came and went out the same day? The hopes and dreams of designers that were shattered by the sound of fifty million women ... laughing themselves to death. — Erma Bombeck

When I said that something was going to cost a certain amount of money, I actually knew what I was talking about. The biggest problem that we were having on the financing front was people with lots of money saying "you need more money to make this film [Moon]," and us saying "no this is the first feature film we want to do it at a budget where we sort of prove ourselves at the starting end of making feature films; we can do this for $5 million." That is where the convincing part between me and Stuart came, we had to convince people with money that we could do it for that budget. — Duncan Jones

The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans. — Malcolm X

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion
the first such faith to emerge since Islam. — Jon Krakauer

I was very active. I was always all over the place trying to do a million things, just into this activity. If you asked me when I was 14 what I wanted to be: "Activist, first, is my occupation. I am an activist." — Lauryn Hill

As you enter the tunnel, the wind gets sucked away, and you squint from the lights overhead. When you adjust the lights, you can see the other side in the distance just as the sound of the radio fades to nothing because the waves just can't reach. Then, you're in the middle of the tunnel, and everything becomes a calm dream. As you see the opening get closer, you just can't get there fast enough. And finally, just when you think you'll never get there, you see the opening right in front of you. And the radio comes back even louder than you remember it. And the wind is waiting. And you fly out of the tunnel onto the bridge. And there it is. The city. A million lights and buildings and everything seems as exciting as the first time you saw it. — Stephen Chbosky

The memory of their first ride was with her when she led him out into the darkness, for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance in a man's life must be done beneath the open sky. She told herself that there were powers stronger than hatred, and spells older and truer than any the maegi had learned in Asshai. The night was black and moonless, but overhead a million stars burned bright. She took that for an omen. — George R R Martin

I was lucky that one of my first movies, 'One Million Years B.C.' was made in Europe by a British company. The Brits, and a lot of the rest of Europe, seemed to really love exotic women. The fact that I was American and exotic just made me more appealing to them. — Raquel Welch

Pliny, writing in 75 CE, complained that there was 'no year in which India does not drain our Empire of at least fifty five million sesterces'.25 In fact, trade with Rome peaked in the latter half of the first century CE during the reign of Tiberius, which is substantiated by the large share of the coins of Augustus and Tiberius among all the Roman coins found in India.26 — Kanakalatha Mukund