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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9db388e | If someone were to come along who would not compromise, a rebel who insisted on taking the only moral path, rejecting violence in all its forms, such a person would seem so menacing that he would be killed, and after his death he would be canonized or deified, because a saint is less dangerous than a rebel. This has happened numerous times, but the first prominent example was a Jew named Jesus. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7d74710 | Jesus was seen as dangerous because he rejected not only warfare and killing but any kind of force. Those in authority saw this as a challenge. How could there be authority without force? | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 39db581 | When a peasant has a baby girl, the family puts up a vegetable every year and gives the jars to her when she's married. This | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| cc5559d | Europe needed printing because it was bursting with creativity. New ideas in the arts and sciences, as well as in social justice and religion, desperately needed to be expressed and disseminated. The Chinese and Muslim eras of innovation were mostly behind them. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| b7536ca | Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb either. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 1b9426d | In some parts of Sweden it was "a dream porridge," in others a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst. No data are available on the success rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f2e2f3e | So you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule." "We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another." In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromolecule, an RNA strand, as a passacaglia, a ground base repeated again and again, in patterns of four that alternated regularly. This was a simple icon, a metaphor in which the repeated ground base stood for the repeated proteins in the RNA; f.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 921a622 | One of history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace. The state must make war, because without war it would have to drop its power politics and renege on its mission to seek advantage over other nations, enhancing itself at the expense of others. And so a religion that is in the service of a.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 2635320 | Then in the fifth century an Algerian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, wrote the enduring apologia for murder on the battlefield, the concept of "just war." Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, declared that the validity of war was a question of inner motive. If a pious man believed in a just cause and truly loved his enemies, it was permissible to go to war and to kill the enemies he loved because he was doing it in .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 1e9fb6a | The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. 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. To" -- | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7f7527d | weak as water. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 3fcda29 | To eat surstromming, the bloated, bluish-white, little headless fish is slit in the belly and the roe removed. None but the brave eat the roe. The splayed fish is mashed hard on the spine with a fork and turned over. The bones can then be easily lifted off. The wine-colored fermented flesh inside is then placed on a buttered krisp, a Swedish cracker, with mashed potatoes. Swedes use a small long yellow fingerling potato with a floury textur.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 54bf2ca | What stronger denunciation of an agrarian society than the charge of bestiality? Even in modern times, when Basque peasants engage in the duel by insults known as xikito, the accusation of bestiality remains a classic attack. And though to most people, sex with a goat would seem sufficiently perverted, it was not even conceded that they had conventional goat sex. It was group sex, and the goat sometimes used an artificial phallus, with the .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| e2ad842 | the Poor Men of Lyons, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| efc5ce8 | It was one thing to talk of using technology to topple the authority of the aristocracy and the Church, but who or what would replace them? Diderot and the French revolutionaries had assumed it would be "the people." But as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet once wryly observed, "The people, in its highest ideal, is difficult to find in the people." As" | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7a74343 | Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 103776c | Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called "tomato ketchup" in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernan Cortes, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. The" | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| e78dac4 | Herodotus, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| caba8f9 | The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to bring this salt not only to Rome but across the interior of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italian peninsula. But as Rome expanded, transporting salt longer distances by road became too costly. Not only did Rome want salt to be affordable for the people, but, more importantly as the Romans became ambitious empire builders, they needed it t.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d656abc | Thirty Years War | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a34c414 | Philosophie du progres, "We are" | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| dca3b10 | THE ROMANS PAID homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 29e47dd | Romans often took family names from agriculture, Cato | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 39e69e9 | 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." The" | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 25111af | One of humankind's most enduring misconceptions is that of nature's bounty... the belief that nature is such a powerful force that it is indestructible. | fishing misconceptions nature oceans | Mark Kurlansky | |
| e0ff8a9 | ahimsa, or nonviolence, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| ccc03f7 | Through these documents, many Japanese can trace their family as far back as 700. By | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 88227a6 | This is a case of a barmaid who was badly bitten by a big dog. | Alfred Denning, Baron Denning | ||
| 511fadf | It still goes. But Pat is the nicest cattle I've ever seen. | Alfred Hitchcock | ||
| b5639bb | Segundo's best friend Silvio traded appliances for clothes, designer clothes--well, not really, but he thought they were--Chinese-made Armani suits and Italian silk shirts from Vietnam, all with designer labels occasionally misspelled. As in the "Versache" pants." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 134c1d9 | nuclear deterrents. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| a0c95c4 | nunna daul Tsuny in the Cherokee language, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 5badefb | Herzl had said that attracting the Jewish diaspora would be a slow process, but after a half century as a nation, according to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, only 17 percent of American Jews have ever visited Israel. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| bb8ad18 | Cherokee faction of fewer than 500 people in a nation of 17,000 who were agreeable to removal. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 890f552 | Manichaeism | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| cc4d918 | Cathars | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 1528bed | softness overcomes hardness. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7c81fb0 | Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 6f907c0 | La no violencia, exactamente igual que la violencia, es una forma de persuadir, una tecnica para el activismo politico, un sistema para prevalecer. La | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| af99564 | The big culprit is methane gas, which, although it does not get as much attention as carbon dioxide, is more than twenty times as destructive in terms of climate change. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 0903e6a | El hinduismo y Gandhi insisten en que la no violencia no debe proceder jamas de la debilidad, sino de la fuerza, y que solo las personas mas fuertes y disciplinadas pueden alcanzarla. Quienes | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| aa8cc94 | Cows are the leading source of hamburger meat in America. Dairy cows are very lean because they put everything into producing milk, so they make good lean ground meat. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 0ac2187 | Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history." Georges Pompidou" | heritage leadership legacy perspective popularity | Mark Kurlansky | |
| ac9739a | New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day. | hero-worship novelty | Mark Kurlansky |