Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

Take the tail of the female tuna—and I'm talking of the large female tuna whose mother city is Byzantium.

Violence requires few ideas, but nonviolence requires imagination.

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.

The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power.

It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the world's religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking, there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find completion - one receiving a missing part and the other shedding an extra one. A salt is a small but perfect thing.

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.

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

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.

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.

The name potash is derived from the process used for making potassium carbonate, cooking down water and wood ash in earthen pots.

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

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

And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.

In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone's favorite luxury—butter.

history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component

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

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.

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 development they would bring to the region.

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 working at all.

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.

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.

A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.

The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating cold foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food.

Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance.