Top 80 Mark Kurlansky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.”

— Mark Kurlansky

2. “Judging foods without regard to price is a rich mans game, and yet poor people can be gourmets able to discern a good potato from a bad one.”

— Mark Kurlansky

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving.”

— Mark Kurlansky

7. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

8. “Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is a part of evolution.”

— Mark Kurlansky

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

11. “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

12. “Antoine-Auguste Parmentier was an eighteenth-century officer who popularized the potato in the French Army, and his name has ever since meant “with potatoes”.”

— Mark Kurlansky

13. “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

14. “Baby formula contains three salts: magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, and sodium chloride.”

— Mark Kurlansky

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

— Mark Kurlansky

16. “At the beginning of the twentieth century, a French monk, Marcel Audiffren, invented the world’s first electric-powered household refrigerator.”

— Mark Kurlansky

17. “It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.”

— Mark Kurlansky

18. “Violence requires few ideas, but nonviolence requires imagination.”

— Mark Kurlansky

19. “If all poor people refused to fight, he argued, the rich would have no army and there would be no war.”

— Mark Kurlansky

20. “A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.”

— Mark Kurlansky

21. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

22. “Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.”

— Mark Kurlansky

23. “Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”

— Mark Kurlansky

24. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

25. “Since the industrial revolution, Great Britain had been developing an ever-increasing market for groundfish – especially cod, haddock, and plaice – because fried fish, later fish-and-chips, became the favorite dish of the urban working class.”

— Mark Kurlansky

26. “Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish.”

— Mark Kurlansky

27. “Cod became almost a religious icon – a mythological crusader for Christian observance.”

— Mark Kurlansky

28. “When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.”

— Mark Kurlansky

29. “Don’t you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer.”

— Mark Kurlansky

30. “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 pilot’s seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968.”

— Mark Kurlansky

31. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

32. “A true gourmet – a judge – has the wisdom to know when to stop eating.”

— Mark Kurlansky

33. “Nature may have even less patience than politicians.”

— Mark Kurlansky

34. “Jamming was our ally. It made people curious about what we were hiding.”

— Mark Kurlansky

35. “The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia – brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.”

— Mark Kurlansky

36. “Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.”

— Mark Kurlansky

37. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

38. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

39. “In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.”

— Mark Kurlansky

40. “There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?”

— Mark Kurlansky

41. “In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.”

— Mark Kurlansky

42. “Whenever I was called a gourmet, I suspected I was being accused of something at least slightly unpleasant. But that was before I heard the term “foodie.” I am still not sure that a gourmet is a good thing to be, but it must be better than a foodie.”

— Mark Kurlansky

43. “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

44. “Literary Teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiated gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink.”

— Mark Kurlansky

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

48. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

49. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky

50. “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.”

— Mark Kurlansky