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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1e92803 | So astute was he in his buying and selling, and in his borrowings, that no one knew if he was in debt. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| faacf2d | High in moral virtue was his speech, and gladly would he learn and gladly teach. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 7b9903b | And Christ's law and His Apostles twelve he taught, but first he followed it himself. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 521b939 | Wherever there is drunkenness about No secret can be hidden, make no doubt. | Geoffrey Chaucer | ||
| 281dc71 | At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| e8841b5 | the Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible but enjoyable. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| c0b3ec1 | ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f142295 | And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7a3faf9 | No one ever escapes Gloucester. Kids go off to college and settle somewhere else. But they always come back. If Gloucester is all you know, every place else seems a little phony. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 3246a7f | Active practitioners of nonviolence are always seen as a threat, a direct menace, to the state. The state maintains the right to kill as its exclusive and jealously guarded privilege. Nothing makes this more clear than capital punishment, which argues that killing is wrong and so the state must kill killers. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 26ef022 | Revolutions are always easier to admire from across the border. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 93d1d3a | In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 5533332 | Writing beautifully--calligraphy--was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 419693e | The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became the international language in the Middle East, also | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 4d2901b | When my enemies seek my life, how can I do other than use my endeavor to destroy them in my own defense?" The" | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f30a4d4 | In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone's favorite luxury--butter. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a022769 | The indigenous people of five continents were facing an intractable enemy from a sixth continent that was convinced that they had the right to steal the land on other | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 55d8f95 | The adversary must first be made into a demon before people will accept the war. This was why during the Cold War, the U.S. government became infuriated at any | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 1c32390 | Butter has the same improbable myth of origin as cheese, that it accidentally got churned in the animal skins of central Asian nomads. Easily spoiled in sunlight, it was a northern food. The Celts and the Vikings, and their descendants, the Normans, are credited with popularizing butter in northern Europe. Southerners remained suspicious and for centuries maintained that the reason more cases of leprosy were found in the north was that nort.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 481b522 | the poor were duped into fighting to defend the privileges of the rich. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 38c34ad | the longer wars last, the less popular they become. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 59a3b6b | In times of war prices of the necessaries of life are generally very much increased, but the prices of labor of the poor do not usually rise. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 0300f19 | One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a254869 | It is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable. | peace war | Mark Kurlansky | |
| ec14cd5 | At about this time the Asiatic wolf, a fierce predator that despite its small size would eat a human if it had the opportunity, came under human control because its friendly young cubs could be fed and trained. A dangerous adversary was turned into a dedicated helper--the dog. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 71cb1e3 | On the one side were Confucians, inspired by Mencius, who, when asked how a state should raise profits, replied, "Why must Your Majesty use the word profit? All I am concerned with are the good and the right. If Your Majesty says, 'How can I profit my state?' your officials will say, 'How can I profit my family?' and officers and common people will say, 'How can I profit myself?' Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the st.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 6c79ab0 | Europeans started wearing linen underwear instead of wool. There is no record indicating that this made the Europeans less irritable, but it did make a lot more rags available. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| c545832 | General Motors, ITT, and Ford come most readily to mind as having plants protected by Hitler, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| b831af1 | The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power. Julius | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 4364ccb | nonviolence is more effective than violence, that violence does not work. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 433738c | while every major language has a word for violence, there is no word to express the idea of nonviolence | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d22e6e9 | Baby formula contains three salts: magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, and sodium chloride. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| c2ca08b | The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. --Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. --Karl Marx, speech, 1856 Dreams are not so different from deeds as some may think. All the deeds of men are only.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 072b3e0 | They leaned over and scooped up handfuls of salt. The police tried to forcibly remove the salt from their hands. A crowd of dissidents ran onto the beach, picked up salt, and were taken away by the police. The protests went on for days, with waves of salt makers followed by waves of police followed by more salt makers. The police called in reinforcements. Soon the jails were filled, and more and more police and protesters were rushing into .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 6995d27 | Toward the end of the first century A.D., a Confucian government minister had them once more abolished, declaring, "Government sale of salt means competing with subjects for profit. These are not measures fit for wise rulers." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d78aa0c | It had all been predicted in Herzl's 1902 novel, Old New Land, in which he imagines visiting the new Jewish state in 1923 and finding the Jews not only exploiting the Dead Sea's mineral wealth but making the desert green through irrigation and living in farm collectives that exported produce to Europe. However, he also predicted that Israel would be a German-speaking nation and that Arabs would eagerly welcome Jews for the economic developm.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d290a85 | There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from worki.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| cee2290 | Now, at peace, Jordan has few resources but is full of plans. Mohammed Noufal observed with a smile, "All we need is Israel's technology, Egypt's workers, Turkey's water, and Saudi Arabia's oil, and I am sure we can build a paradise here." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 48ae790 | At the time when Pope Pius VII had to leave Rome, which had been conquered by revolutionary French, the committee of the Chamber of Commerce in London was considering the herring fishery. One member of the committee observed that, since the Pope had been forced to leave Rome, Italy was probably going to become a Protestant country. "Heaven help us," cried another member. "What," responded the first, "would you be upset to see the number of .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| dd4dd34 | Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 93979fe | A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory. | evangelism influence media technology | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 29b82cd | Unique to Sichuan, ma is the spicy flavor of a wild tree peppercorn called huajiao--with a taste between peppercorn, caraway, and clove, but so strong that too much will numb the mouth. Two varieties grow in Sichuan, clay red peppercorns and the more perfumey brown ones. La means "hot spice" and is accomplished with small burning red peppers. The combined seasoning, ma-la, defines the taste of Sichuan food." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 3794309 | Theoretically, pickling can be accomplished without salt, but the carbohydrates and proteins in the vegetables tend to putrefy too quickly to be saved by the emerging lactic acid. Without salt, yeast forms, and the fermentation process leads to alcohol rather than pickles. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 4acf9ca | The true expression of nonviolence is compassion, which is not just a passive emotional response, but a rational stimulus to action. | Mark Kurlansky |