Billions Quotes - Page 24

• 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

  House, Guy, Paper

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• Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.

  R. Scott Bakker

  Thinking, Belief, Handle

  R. Scott Bakker (2009). “Neuropath”, p.59, Macmillan

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• My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn't seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky.

  Ben Bova

  Sex, Teenager, People

  "Men on Mars, Women on Venus". Interview with Jay McDonald, Bookpage, June 1999.

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• We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe, That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars, Scientists say it's true, but acknowledge that it may be refined, And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.

  Simon Singh

  Errors, Light, Years

  "Katie Melua's bad science" by Simon Singh, www.theguardian.com. September 30, 2005.

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• I would be very happy to see 3.5 billion humans wiped out from the face of the earth within the next 150 or 200 years and I am quite prepared to go myself with this majority... let us all look forward to the day when the catastrophe strikes us down!

  John Aspinall

  Years, Majority, Would Be

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• It is unacceptable that more than 1 billion people are hungry every day while another billion are obese.

  Paul Polman

  People, Hungry, Obese

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• Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.

  Achim Steiner

  Independent, Reality, People

  "Bee deaths may signal wider pollination threat: U.N." by Alister Doyle, www.reuters.com. March 10, 2011.

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• Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

  Philip Slater

  Jobs, Buying Things, People

  Philip Slater (2016). “The Pursuit of Loneliness: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal”, p.182, Beacon Press

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• Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.

  Margaret Visser

  Breastfeeding, Satisfaction, Bread

  Margaret Visser (2015). “The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners”, p.16, Open Road Media

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• There is no technical reason why we could not feed a world of nine billion people. Hunger is a matter of buying power, not of shortages.

  Louise Fresco

  People, World, Matter

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• There are 7 billion people in the world, and 5.1 billion of them have a cell phone, and 4 billion have a toothbrush.

  Chuck Martin

  Phones, Cells, People

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• A magazine feature can reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers for a fashion brand. The way to reach a billion? Dress the actresses competing for attention at a highly televised event.

  Tamara Mellon

  Fashion, Actresses, Events

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• The President sends us a billion-page paper that shows how he would spend the money if he were spending the money. He doesn't have the authority to spend the money. He doesn't spend $1 of the money.

  Michael Enzi

  President, Paper, Pages

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• Over the last 40 years, I have built MW into a multi-billion dollar company with amazing employees and loyal customers who value the products and service they receive at MW. Over the past several months I have expressed my concerns to the Board about the direction the company is currently heading.Instead of fostering the kind of dialogue in the Boardroom that has in part contributed to our success, the Board has inappropriately chosen to silence my concerns through termination as an executive officer.

  George Zimmer

  Past, Years, Loyal Customers

  "Fired Men's Wearhouse Founder Slams The Board In An Explosive Statement" by Ashley Lutz, www.businessinsider.com. June 19, 2013.

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• Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

  Aaron Levie

  Uber, Doe, World

  Twitter post from Aug 23, 2013

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• I remember we were out on the road when the album finally came out in February 1973. I listened to it in my hotel room and just got this really big smile. I was thinking, 'It's amazing, we're really pulling this off'. The album was very, very unique and very, very different. I was really proud of the songs, especially 'No More Mr Nice Guy', 'Billion Dollar Babies' and 'Generation Landslide'.

  Michael Bruce

  Song, Baby, Nice

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• Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Struggle, Simple, Oxygen

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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• When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it's four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.

  Paul Erdos

  Education, Children, Math

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• Directing is much more psychological-it's a lot like being a general. And you have to be organized. While you're making a film, you have between two and 500 people asking you a billion questions.

  Julie Taymor

  Two, People, Asking

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• Only man is a narcissistic enough species to think that a highly evolved alien life force would travel across billions and billions of light-years- a group of aliens so intelligent, so insouciant, so utterly above it all, they feel no need whatsoever to equip their spacecraft with windows so that they can gaze out on all that celestial beauty-but then immediately upon landing, their first impulse is to get in some hick's ass with a flashlight.

  Dennis Miller

  Intelligent, Men, Thinking

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• All told, these profit levels have put the world's five largest publicly traded oil companies on track to earn more than $100 billion before year's end. Yet, at the same time that Big Oil's bottom line is going up, so are Americans' energy costs.

  Allyson Schwartz

  Years, Oil, Track

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• 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

  Creativity, People, Culture

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• 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 Streetm 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

  Wall, Years, Elephants

  "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America". Book by David Stockman, 2013.

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• I have this ratio that if you divide age of entrepreneur by market cap of company. For Facebook it's one. Every year of his life Zuckerberg has been making $1 billion for investors.

  Yuri Milner

  Years, Zuckerberg, Entrepreneur

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• If leaders in the space program had at its beginning in the 1940s, pointed out the benefits to people on earth rather than emphasizing the search for proof of evolution in space, the program would have saved $100 billion in tax money and achieved greater results.

  Walter Lang

  Space, People, Leader

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