Quotes by Mark Kurlansky

“I hope Bush, with his interest in history, will realize that, in time, the fights over oil will look equally foolish. Government has the ability to foster research and develop existing technology to move the world away from oil.”

“Chloride is essential for digestion and in respiration. Without sodium, which the body cannot manufacture, the body would be unable to transport nutrients or oxygen, transmit nerve impulses, or move muscles, including the heart.”

“Fast freezing had at last made the unsalted fish people wanted available to everyone, even far inland. Soon fishing vessels, instead of salting their catch at sea, were freezing it on board. Most salted foods became delicacies instead of necessities.”

“Examining the oyster is an accessible way to take on the issue of urban development. Even though Im from New England, I never wanted to eat cod that much. Oysters are much better.”

“With cultivation, the New York oyster industry thought it had beaten nature. But the city still didnt take care of its water. London, where oysters once came from the Thames, has a similar story.”

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.

It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilots seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968

Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history. Georges Pompidou

One of humankinds most enduring misconceptions is that of natures bounty... the belief that nature is such a powerful force that it is indestructible.

Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.

Dont you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer

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

Children need fairy tales, but it is just as essential that they have parents who tell them about their own lives, so that they can establish a relationship to the past.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

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.

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.

I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule. Clarence Birdseye