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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 095bdb7 | In 1411, the French Crown granted a patent declaring that only the cheese of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon could be called Roquefort cheese. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 1bf859d | According to Seneca, Apicius committed suicide because, having spent one tenth of a considerable fortune on his kitchen, he realized that he could not long continue in the style he had chosen. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 8e1562b | The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| e111651 | There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid in it: ... Men try to catch the murex alive because it discharges its juice when it dies. They obtain the juice from the larger purple-fish by removing the shell: they crush the smaller ones together with their shell, which is the only way to make them yield their juice.... The vein already mentioned is removed, and to this, salt has to be added in the proportion of about one pint for.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| fcf6719 | Rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot envy each other's hearths, and so they are free from the vices that rule the world. All your emulation centers on the saltworks; instead of ploughs and scythes, you work rollers [for salt production] whence comes all your gain. Upon your industry all other products depend for, although there may be someone who does not seek gol.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| b85b9b0 | Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f5a3111 | Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local production of salt. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 250c7ad | The name potash is derived from the process used for making potassium carbonate, cooking down water and wood ash in earthen pots. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a472f1f | At the beginning of the twentieth century, a French monk, Marcel Audiffren, invented the world's first electric-powered household refrigerator | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| b601250 | Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 2b340f8 | The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 8ff9af4 | ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!" | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 9f83304 | In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, including an elaborate mosque. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f25533a | Jamming was our ally. It made people curious about what we were hiding. | evangelism persecution | Mark Kurlansky | |
| aa55079 | Violence requires few ideas, but nonviolence requires imagination. | influence leadership vision | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 012d2ce | When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a27fa6f | Both the steamboat service to Albany and the Erie Canal were destined to be swiftly fleeting marvels, eclipsed by the next idea. Only seven years after the Seneca Chief brought whitefish to New York Harbor, the city's railroad age had begun. The | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a701cc7 | A form of entertainment that has recently become very popular, particularly in the smaller towns, is the Coca-Cola party. Usually the ladies assemble between eleven and twelve in the morning at the home of the hostess. Trays of tall iced glasses filled with Coca-Cola are passed, followed by platters of crackers and small iced cakes. The dining table is decorated like any tea-table with flowers, fruit or mints, except that there are little b.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 1f4ea89 | Both Jews and Muslims believe that salt protects against the evil eye. The Book of Ezekial mentions rubbing newborn infants with salt to protect them from evil. The practice in Europe of protecting newborns either by putting salt on their tongues or by submerging them in saltwater is thought to predate Christian baptism. In France, until the practice was abolished in 1408, children were salted until they were baptized. In parts of Europe, e.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 44778f3 | There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth. | dreams history vision war | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 3a5f625 | The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously st.. | language | Monique Truong | |
| 10afd71 | Time for me had always been measured in terms of the rising sun, its setting sister, and the dependable cycle of the moon. but at sea, I learned that time can also be measured in terms of water, in terms of the distance traveled while drifting on it. When measured in this way, nearer and farther are the path of time's movement, not continuously forward along a fast straight line. When measured in this way, time loops and curlicues, and at a.. | Monique Truong | ||
| 5892104 | Time that refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be "lost." In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can make the night seem eternal and full of stars." | Monique Truong | ||
| f494922 | Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys. | Monique Truong | ||
| 7147a84 | We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8a8be3c | good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 02c2df8 | Consciousness is the hard problem. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| d04282e | They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds. | philosophy science | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 2501ace | Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totali.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 8fb642f | After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship's changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 637375f | Language is nothing but a huge set of false analogies | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f369777 | People didn't understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one's life. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 65fcf5e | Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 91b015a | Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simple: these things happened. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1ad53c7 | You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you). | choice reality | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 1365d6b | One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 30a3e0e | A major part of sustainability is social justice, here and everywhere. Think of it this way: justice is a technology. It's like a software program that we use to cope with the world and get along with each other, and one of the most effective we have ever invented, because we are all in this together. When you realize that acting with justice and generosity turns out to be the most effective technology for dealing with other people, that's .. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2abe92c | Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it's hard to fix! Ha-ha. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 26e9494 | Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy: "You said, 'I shall go to another land to another sea Another city will be found better than this. My every effort is a written indictment And my heart--like the dead--is buried. How long will my mind be in this decay,' "and so on like that, it's the same old song we know so well--if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor f.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 724e65a | So it's still New York. People can't give up on it. It's what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you've put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your losses and walk. You are forced by the structure of the situation to throw good money after bad, grow obsessed, double down, escalate your commitment, and become a mad gibbering apartment dweller, unable to imagine leaving. You persevere unto dea.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 780f63e | Becoming a shaman is a fate that can strike anyone. Even you. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 090bc8d | So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 7cf7573 | Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce... | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| b5f65cb | If you want to write a novel about our world now, you'd better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused. | Kim Stanley Robinson |