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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 294ee1b | I said, 'there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of .. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| fa30086 | regard to good morals than to great abilities; for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe, that the common size of human understanding is fitted to some station or other; and that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 704c547 | A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| a3143ae | Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 4bc51d8 | They walked, some of them for miles, from rural villages deep in the bush. They came in wheelbarrows, in wheelchairs. They came with babies on their back. They came the night before, some of them sleeping on the hard ground outside the polling booths so they could vote when morning came. The | Helene Cooper | ||
| 0ac9a74 | Throgh me men gon into that blysful place Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure; Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of grace, There grene and lusty May shal evere endure. This is the wey to al good aventure. Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-caste; Al open am I - passe in, and sped thee faste!' 'Thorgh me men gon,' than spak that other side, 'Unto the mortal strokes of the spere Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde, There nevere tre .. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 078f800 | people have managed to marry without arithmetic | bible marriage maths rules tenets | Geoffrey Chaucer | |
| 2b34e19 | O woman's counsel is so often cold! A woman's counsel brought us first to woe, Made Adam out of Paradise to go Where he had been so merry, so well at ease. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 434568c | Men may the wise atrenne, and naught atrede. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 68a6942 | For thus men seyth, "That on thenketh the beere, But al another thenketh his ledere." | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 89aea15 | Fortune has dealt us this adversity: Some malign aspect or disposition Of Saturn in some adverse position Has brought it on us; nothing's to be done: It stood thus in our stars when we were born; The long and short of it is this: Endure. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 2aed971 | In general, my liege lady,' he began, 'Women desire to have dominion Over their husbands, and their lovers too; They want to have mastery over them. That's what you most desire--even if my life Is forfeit. I am here; do what you like. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 53cea79 | we know little of the things for which we pray | naivete prayer supernatural | Geoffrey Chaucer | |
| 0eadad5 | Lo, which a greet thing is affeccioun! | imagination judgment | Chaucer Geoffrey | |
| 6fadc27 | Deacon met my glare with an impish grin. "Anyway, did you celebrate Valentine's Day when you were slumming with the mortals?" I blinked. "Not really. Why?" Aiden snorted and then disappeared into one of the rooms. "Follow me," Deacon said. "You're going to love this. I just know it." I followed him down the dimly-lit corridor that was sparsely decorated. We passed several closed doors and a spiral staircase. Deacon went through an archway a.. | Jennifer L. Armentrout | ||
| 9189fef | if gold rust, what shall iron do? For if a Priest, upon whom we trust, be foul, no wonder a layman may yield to lust. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| b95a8c2 | Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 829480b | Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 9c477bd | It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 83ca4ea | Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is a part of evolution. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 4680fef | For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant "of assured value." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 47ed90d | THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 0570df0 | Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| fe92b61 | Mohandas's marriage, which was arranged when he was thirteen, lasted for the next sixty-two years. Despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily and struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. In violation of his family's religious code, he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make him large and strong like the carnivorous Englis.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 4b35352 | The Chinese had first learned of the Roman Empire in 139 B.C., when the emperor Wudi had sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, past the deserts to seek allies to the west. Zhang Qian traveled for twelve years to what is now Turkistan and back and reported on the astounding discovery that there was a fairly advanced civilization to the west. In 104 B.C. and 102 B.C., Chinese armies reached the area, a former Greek kingdom called Sogdiana with its capit.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 976441a | Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked. | suffering | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 65f5f99 | When these early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression red herring, meaning "a false trail." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 73499b6 | The Egyptians of 4000 B.C. believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives. The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive, zait, is probably older than the Greek word, elaia, and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| cafd482 | It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 39ddf02 | Pastrami, of Romanian origin, is dried, spiced, and salted beef, smoked over hardwood sawdust and then steamed. The name may come from pastra, the Romanian verb "to preserve." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d7e1fa4 | In nineteenth-century Russia, sauerkraut was valued more than caviar, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7d1c879 | To the glee of the British press, a letter has recently been discovered. The letter had been sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol, while Columbus was taking bows for his discovery of America. The letter, from Bristol merchants, alleged that he knew perfectly well that they had been to America already. It is not known if Columbus ever replied. He didn't need to. Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| e382127 | Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a54e0dc | That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could af.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a7fd327 | After a week's worth of failed fairy tales--stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut--my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coast of a different world. On this island, there stood a city whose buildings were made of glass. He told me that at the heart of this city was a forest with trees, ponds and a lake, swans and horses, and even a small castle. He told me that the.. | Monique Truong | ||
| 5fce690 | The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d7b3f7e | He is the same soul. You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is .. | intellect love | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 50bc12c | Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. Compare it to the present course of history. If you can. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| eb8767f | Freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8382125 | Life is complex, and entropy is real. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| b13133b | So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive noti.. | reflections religion | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 394558b | Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 152b21f | Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2e7c06b | The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn't wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didn't want to know. For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they didn't want to know. And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joe's logic was stronger.. | Kim Stanley Robinson |