My personal fascination with the power of the crowd has been growing: Exactly what can a 'crowd' accomplish? We know crowds can raise billions of dollars, create Wikipedia, and even design and build small autonomous drones. But how about something large and complex like designing a new car, and maybe someday even a spaceship?

Public anger over bank bailouts was as much about fairness as the billions of dollars spent.

"My soul was waiting billions of years

"The soul seems to consist of billions of stars of dreams and hopes. We are unknown worlds even for ourselves, our mood and sensations are nature. In space, you can live billions of lives and billions of moods as moods of nature. An endless abundance of varieties of images of life experiences, the universe lulls us with dreams and depth of knowledge.

The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried.

"I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.

We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.

Imagine that you were on the threshold of this fairytale, sometime billions of years ago when everything was created. And you were able to choose whether you wanted to be born to a life on this planet at some point. You wouldn't know when you were going to be born, nor how long you'd live for, but at any event it wouldn't be more than a few years. All you'd know was that, if you chose to come into the world at some point, you'd also have to leave it again one day and go away from everything. This might cause you a good deal of grief, as lots of people think that life in the great fairytale is so wonderful that the mere thought of it ending can bring tears to their eyes. Things can be so nice here that it's terribly painful to think that at some point the days will run out. What would you have chosen, if there had been some higher power that had gave you the choice? Perhaps we can imagine some sort of cosmic fairy in this great, strange fairytale. What you have chosen to live a life on earth at some point, whether short or long, in a hundred thousand or a hundred million years? Or would you have refused to join in the game because you didn't like the rules? (...) I asked myself the same question maybe times during the past few weeks. Would I have elected to live a life on earth in the firm knowledge that I'd suddenly be torn away from it, and perhaps in the middle of intoxicating happiness? (...) Well, I wasn't sure what I would have chosen. (...) If I'd chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I'd never have known what I've lost. Do you see what I'm getting at? Sometimes it's worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

We spend billions of pounds on welfare yet millions are trapped on welfare. It's not worth their while going into work.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation by children being taught mathematical concepts.

The Arab League tells us to go in and take out Qaddafi. We've spent billions of dollars already with respect to the Arab League. Billions of dollars because they told us to do it. Why aren't they paying for it? They don't like Qaddafi Qaddafi's been a terrible thorn in their side.

Billions of people don't practice a religion at all.

Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.

Confronting a stadium audience you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and of course you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

Billions of people have seen and been influenced by movies in the short history of this industry.

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.

I don't know how to construct a career that'll make me famous. Except maybe get my ears pinned back get my teeth done and go to America. But then I'll be competing with billions of actors who haven't got false teeth and who are 25.

Billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy. Philanthropy is decades behind business in applying rigorous thinking to the use of money.