All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into material force.

- Karl Marx, speech, 1856

You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his flavor, with which shall it be salted? It is thereafter good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under the foot of men.

- Matthew 5:13

Today thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish. The 17th century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence on foreign oil.

 In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

- Mark Kurlanksy, Salt: A World History, 2002