Jared Diamond Quotes

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

One person making a wrong decision affects the whole country.

Australia is the most isolated continent.

We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.

The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment.

African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.

In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.

I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.

A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance being murdered as the average human.

I've always been interested in a lot of things, and a lot of things at the same time, and I always tried to explain them to myself. I ask a lot of questions.

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves

Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.

The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.

I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons.

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.