1907 Half Dollar Quotes

Things you can buy
with half a million dollars:

a car that looks more
like a space creature than a car.

A designer platinum purse
to carry a small dog. A small dog.

A performance by your favorite
musical artist for your birthday.

A diamond-encrusted
bottle of Dominican rum.

A mansion. A yacht. A hundred
acres of land. Houses, but not homes.

All four years of college
or beautician school & certificate.

Five hundred flights
to the Dominican Republic.

A half million Dollar Store chess sets,
with their accompanying boxes.

A hundred thousand copies
of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Apparently a father. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo

In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital.

Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964.


Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. ~ Captain Hank, "Seawater Three"

His wife, Electra, was a capable helpmeet, although - like himself - a dreamer of dreams and a private dabbler in romance. The first thing she did, after her marriage - child as she was, aged only nineteen - was to buy an acre of ground on the edge of the town, and pay down the cash for it - twenty-five dollars, all her fortune. Saladin had less, by fifteen. She instituted a vegetable garden there, got it farmed on shares by the nearest neighbor, and made it pay her a hundred per cent. a year. Out of Saladin's first year's wage she put thirty dollars in the savings-bank, sixty out of his second, a hundred out of his third, a hundred and fifty out of his fourth. His wage went to eight hundred a year, then, and meantime two children had arrived and increased the expenses, but she banked two hundred a year from the salary, nevertheless, thenceforth. When she had been married seven years she built and furnished a pretty and comfortable two-thousand-dollar house in the midst of her garden-acre, paid half of the money down and moved her family in. Seven years later she was out of debt and had several hundred dollars out earning its living. ~ Mark Twain

Big Yellow Taxi

They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

Hey farmer, farmer
Put away the DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees, please

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot

I said, "Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot"

They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot ~ Joni Mitchell

They ask me things like: what is the right way to address a duke? An' once again I have to point out that it is a matter of fine details, such as, if there's a gate needs holdin' open and it looks like half a dollar might be forthcoming, it's 'G'day, your graciousness,' whereas if you've just set fire to his ancestral piles and the mob is breakin' the windows it is more suitable to address him as 'you bloated lying blutocat!' It is all a matter of finesse ~ Terry Pratchett

They tax when you earn a dollar, they tax you when you save it, they tax you when you invest it. If you earn a dividend, they tax it again, and if you're stupid enough to die, they steal up to half. ~ Grover Norquist

The pharmaceutical drug industry is a half-trillion dollar per year global industry, with almost 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. The pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders rely on people to be sick, or else their stocks will plummet. There is no money to be made in health. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects. ~ Mary Stewart

If somebody told me you'd be a one and a half billion dollar company and be the largest in the world, I wouldn't have believed it myself. ~ Baba Kalyani

We're in the Chicago suburbs, ruling our 'hood and the streets that lead here. It's a street war, where other
suburban gangs fight us for territory. Three blocks away are mansions and million-dollar houses. Right here,
in the real world, the street war rages on. The people in the million-dollar houses don't even realize a battle is
about to begin less than a half mile from their backyards. ~ Simone Elkeles

I don't think this is a children's princess party!" I shout over the noise of the rambunctious men as a shower of dollar bills land at my feet. One of the men yells "TAKE IT OFF!"

"Gee, you think?!" Ariel yells back. "Some guy just unzipped his pants and pulled his dick out!"

Isabelle whimpers, shoving her face harder into Ariel's arm.

"What did you do?!"

"What do you think I did? I looked at it. It was a pretty good dick. Nice length, excellent girth. I give it an 8.5 on the dick scale," she says with a shrug. "He lost a point and a half for calling his dick Sanford and informing me that Sanford spits when he's excited. Like I haven't heard that one before. Lame. ~ Tara Sivec

If I had a dollar for every time a random woman walked up to me and tried to seduce me, I'd have 50 cents. That's assuming drag queens are half price. ~ Jarod Kintz

If stocks double but the dollar loses half its value, who beyond Wall Street are the winners and losers? ~ David Malpass

Kristin Brown looks as though she could have been mailed first-class to New York for about a dollar and a half. ~ William E. Geist

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful. ~ Sherwood Anderson

He's a wealthy man, a very wealthy man. If you have a half a million-dollar purchase from Tiffany's, you're not a middle-class American. ~ Mitt Romney

One of the biggest health problems facing America's poor is obesity. You know you live in a good place when overeating is a problem.
Most of the 6 billion people in the world live short, brutal, miserable lives; 1 billion people try to survive on just a dollar a day. They would love to have the lifestyle of America's poor. Ninety-seven percent of American families our government classifies as 'poor' have color televisions and half own two. Seventy-five percent of poor people have cars and nearly half own their own homes. ~ John Stossel

If eating out, order your meal and ask the server to wrap up half of the portion to take home with your for the next day, keeping your portion size in check, and stretching your dollar into two meals. ~ Cat Cora

My glass is not only half-full, it holds five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle Dom Perignon champagne. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Just tell me, Percy, do you still have the birthday gift I gave you last summer?" I nodded and pulled out my camp necklace. It had a bead for every summer I'd been at Camp Half-Blood, but since last year I'd also kept a sand dollar on the cord. My father had given it to me for my fifteenth birthday. He'd told me I would know when to "spend it," but so far I hadn't figured out what he meant. All I knew that it didn't fit the vending machines in the school cafeteria. ~ Rick Riordan

The one-eyed man stood helplessly by. "I'll help ya if ya want," he said. "Know what that son-of-a-bitch done? He come by an' he got on white pants. An' he says, 'Come on, le's go out to my yacht.' By God, I'll whang him some day!" He breathed heavily. "I ain't been out with a woman sence I los' my eye. An' he says stuff like that." And big tears cut channels in the dirt beside his nose.

Tom said impatiently, "Whyn't you roll on? Got no guards to keep ya here."

"Yeah, that's easy to say. Ain't so easy to get a job - not for a one-eye' man."

Tom turned on him. "Now look-a-here, fella. You got that eye wide open. An' ya dirty, ya stink. Ya jus' askin' for it. Ya like it. Lets ya feel sorry for yaself. 'Course ya can't get no woman with that empty eye flappin' aroun'. Put somepin over it an' wash ya face. You ain't hittin' nobody with no pipe wrench."

"I tell ya, a one-eye' fella got a hard row," the man said. "Can't see stuff the way other fellas can. Can't see how far off a thing is. Ever'thing's jus' flat."

Tom said, "Ya full of crap. Why, I knowed a one-legged whore one time. Think she was takin' two-bits in a alley? No, by God! She's gettin' half a dollar extra. She says, 'How many one-legged women you slep' with? None!' she says. 'O.K.,' she says. 'You got somepin pretty special here, an it's gonna cos' ya half a buck extry.' An' by God, she was gettin' 'em, too, an' the fellas comin' out thinkin' they're pretty lucky. ~ John Steinbeck

What if you had to pay for air? a dollar a breath,
Half the hood would pass out and choke to death ~ Kadda Sheekoff

A thing that has always baffled me about women is that they will saturate themselves with a pint of perfume, a pound of sachet powder, an evil-smelling lip rouge, a peculiar-smelling hair ointment and a half-dozen varieties of body oils, and then have the effrontery to complain of the aroma of a fine dollar cigar. ~ Groucho Marx

You could buy a suckling pig with it, if you want to. You could raise it, and it would raise a litter of pigs, worth four, five dollars apiece. Or you can trade that half-dollar for lemonade, and drink it up. You do as you want, it's your money. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime. ~ Karl Rove

Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. "Three quarters of the population live below the poverty line - that's one U.S. dollar a day - half are on less than fifty cents a day. What infrastructure there was has been destroyed - roads, ports, municipal electricity, water, sanitation, schools, hospitals - all desperately lacking or nonexistent; eighty-six-percent unemployment, no street lights. . . . ~ Zadie Smith

Josephine Butler (1828-1907) writes in her journals, pamphlets and diaries of the second half of the nineteenth century about seeing thousands (yes, thousands) of little girls, some as young as four or five, in the illegal brothels of London, Paris, Brussels, and Geneva ... The children had a life expectancy of two years, yet the brothel owners, frquently women, seemed to have an unlimited supply ... 'Clean' children, who were free from venereal disease, commanded a high price. All this is well documented, but strangely Mrs [sic] Butler never mentions little boys, though this branch of the trade must have been going on. ~ Jennifer Worth

The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn't afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He'd taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping - complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean. ~ Diana Rowland

If you buy all the stocks selling at or below two times earnings, you will lose money on half of them because instead of making profits they will actually lose money, but you will only lose a dollar or so a share at most. Then others will be mediocre performers. But the remaining big winners will go up and produce fabulous results and also ensure a good overall result. ~ John Templeton

Nearly a Valediction"

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive

you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your m ~ Marilyn Hacker

My own view is that, since we have it and since it gives such pleasure to so many, especially around the world, it would be folly to get rid of it. The backside of whom are we going to lick when we send a letter in the Republic of Britain? William Hague? Harriet Harman? An elected British President will not glamourize the heads of state of other countries when they come on a state visit. Compared to carriages, crowns, orbs and ermine, an entry-level Jaguar and Marks & Spencer suit offer no edge over other nations when vying for trade advantages. By definition half the country will despise a Labour President or a Conservative one, and you can bet your bottom dollar that politicians will ensure that, if we do become a republic, there will be little other choice than the major parties. Which, at the time of writing, might include UKIP. Lovely. ~ Stephen Fry

'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I was taught that candles are like house cats - domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There's no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we're not used to fire. Candles are a staple of the Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we're pretty bad Jews. ~ Sloane Crosley

The Herb Farm reminded Marguerite of the farms in France; it was like a farm in a child's picture book. There was a white wooden fence that penned in sheep and goats, a chicken coop where a dozen warm eggs cost a dollar, a red barn for the two bay horses, and a greenhouse. Half of the greenhouse did what greenhouses do, while the other half had been fashioned into very primitive retail space. The vegetables were sold from wooden crates, all of them grown organically, before such a process even had a name- corn, tomatoes, lettuces, seventeen kinds of herbs, squash, zucchini, carrots with the bushy tops left on, spring onions, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries for two short weeks in June, pumpkins after the fifteenth of September. There was chèvre made on the premises from the milk of the goats; there was fresh butter. And when Marguerite showed up for the first time in the summer of 1975 there was a ten-year-old boy who had been given the undignified job of cutting zinnias, snapdragons, and bachelor buttons and gathering them into attractive-looking bunches. ~ Elin Hilderbrand

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes! ~ Ray Bradbury

Indians chase the vision, white men chase the dollar, ~ John Fire Lame Deer

I have five flashlights and each performs its own trick. I have a raincoat with zippers and net material so I never get too hot in a downpour. I have a shelf crammed with books and a shortwave that speaks Arabic, Japanese, Dutch and Russian. They have mud huts with maybe a few chairs and faded pages of old magazines fastened to the wall. I ride my twenty-one speed Peace Corps-issue bike to Ferke not to save a dollar on transport but for the luxury of exercise. They ride in from their settlements on cranky old mopeds or bikes with a single cog because it's the only option. And they give me charity. I just stare at it - near tears. To refuse their offer would be pure insult. So I do the rounds again shaking hands with all the men in boubous saying over and over "An y che " Thank you. ~ Sarah Erdman

By that time, Damen had received the tally of the dead: twelve hundred of us, six and a half thousand of them. He ~ C.S. Pacat

Crouching, Ceony felt the edge of the giant crack. None of it came away in her fingers, even when she scratched it with her nails. The rock stayed hard and firm. Another handful of sand dropped to the canyon floor, seeming to make no difference in the canyon's depth whatsoever. But Ceony knew that enough handfuls would fill it, eventually. After all, it took time to mend one's heart. Enough time could heal a heart as broken as this one. It was half-healed already. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fanhood or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. Meanwhile, as citizens of the political commonwealth, we are conscripted into a polarized climate of ideological belligerence in which bluster too often substitutes for argument. There is no room for doubt and little time ~ A.O. Scott

[...] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel - gently he grasped the copper handle of the door - the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then - he started opening the door - he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Ninety percent of hockey is mental and the other half is physical. ~ Wayne Gretzky