“Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?”

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes…" by Walker Percy?

Walker Percy55

Southern philosophical novelist 1916–1990

Related quotes

“I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said 'billion' many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said 'billions and billions.' For one thing, it's imprecise. How many billions are 'billions and billions'? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? 'Billions and billions' is pretty vague… For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn't utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I've gotten over that. So, for the record, here it goes: 'Billions and billions.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

List of misquotations
Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997)

“Experimentalists dream of some spectacular discovery such as the proof of the existence of black holes to justify the more than eight billion dollars it has cost to build the LHC.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 5, Conventional Black Holes, p. 88

“This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"A Film from the Sixties"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)

“As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe as measured from the beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, of a percent (10^-84). And that's why, for me, the most astonishing wonder of the universe isn't a star or a planet or a galaxy. It isn't a thing at all. It's an instant in time. And that time is now. Humans have walked the earth for just the shortest fraction of that briefest of moments in deep time. But in our 200,000 years on this planet we've made remarkable progress. It was only 2,500 years ago that we believed that the sun was a god and measured its orbit with stone towers built on the top of a hill. Today the language of curiosity is not sun gods, but science. And we have observatories that are almost infinitely more sophisticated than those towers, that can gaze out deep into the universe. And perhaps even more remarkably through theoretical physics and mathematics we can calculate what the universe will look like in the distant future. And we can even make concrete predictions about its end. And I believe that it's only by continuing our exploration of the cosmos and the laws of nature that govern it that we can truly understand ourselves and our place in this universe of wonders.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

Conclusion in Wonders of the Universe - Destiny

“You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies—literally beyond counting—and this is only one universe.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 20

“I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.”

Michael Lewis (1960) American writer

Source: Boomerang (2011), Chapter 2, p.17

“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money.”

Everett Dirksen (1896–1969) United States Army officer

Although often quoted, it seems Dirksen never actually said this. The Dirksen Congressional Research Center made an extensive search https://web.archive.org/web/20140127115225/http://www.dirksencenter.org:80/print_emd_billionhere.htm when fully 25% of enquiries to them were about the quotation. They could find Dirksen did say "a billion here, a billion there", and things close to that, but not the "pretty soon you're talking real money" part. They had one gentleman report to them he had asked Dirksen about it on an airplane trip and received the reply: "Oh, I never said that. A newspaper fella misquoted me once, and I thought it sounded so good that I never bothered to deny it." <br class="br">The Yale Book of Quotations cites a similar statement in The New York Times on Jan. 10, 1938: "Well, now, about this new budget. It’s a billion here and a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money." https://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22fred%20r.%20shapiro%22%20yale%20book%20of%20quotations&pg=PA206#v=onepage&q=%22everett%20m.%20dirksen%22&f=false <br class="br">Misattributed

“We have 7 billion people on this planet. It’s not that there’s not enough room on this planet for 7 billion people, it’s that the energy needs for 7 billion people are 7 billion people’s worth of energy needs, as opposed to, say, 2 billion. Imagine how much pollution would be in the air and the oceans if there were only 2 billion people putting it in? So yeah, we’re already overpopulated.”

Morgan Freeman (1937) American actor, film director, and narrator

Source: [Stern, Marlow, Janbuary 28, 2014, Morgan Freeman on God, Satan, and How the Human Race Has ‘Become A Parasite’, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/morgan-freeman-kerry-washington-celebrate-oscars-science-at-breakthrough-prize-ceremony-1064160, The Daily Beast, New York, December 4, 2017]

“There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.”

A. Whitney Brown (1952) American stand-up comedian

The Big Picture: An American Commentary (1991)

“Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Walker Percy55

Related quotes

Related topics