Top 100 Jared Diamond Quotes
#1. Jared Diamond to describe agriculture as "the worst mistake in the history of the human race.")
Gary Taubes
#2. Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
Jared Diamond
#3. In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.
Jared Diamond
#4. Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.
Jared Diamond
#5. 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.
Jared Diamond
#6. (On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda
Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.
Jared Diamond
#7. Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One
Jared Diamond
#8. Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks ... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.
Jared Diamond
#9. Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.
Jared Diamond
#10. half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until
Jared Diamond
#11. Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
Jared Diamond
#12. My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.
Jared Diamond
#13. Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.
Jared Diamond
#14. 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.
Jared Diamond
#15. Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
Jared Diamond
#16. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems.
Jared Diamond
#18. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. So,
Jared Diamond
#19. 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.
Jared Diamond
#20. Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure.
Jared Diamond
#21. Maritime technology coupled with political organization was similarly essential for European expansions to other continents, as well as for expansions of many other peoples.
Jared Diamond
#22. Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.
Jared Diamond
#24. The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.
Jared Diamond
#25. 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.
Jared Diamond
#26. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
Jared Diamond
#27. We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists ... to understand how those evil things came about.
Jared Diamond
#28. Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Of
Jared Diamond
#29. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
Jared Diamond
#30. I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.
Jared Diamond
#31. [T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
Jared Diamond
#32. Commoners had to prostrate themselves before high-ranking chiefs. All the members of chiefly lineages, bureaucrats, and some craft specialists were freed from the work of food production.
Jared Diamond
#33. 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.
Jared Diamond
#34. [W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
Jared Diamond
#35. 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.
Jared Diamond
#36. Throughout history, adultery has had few rivals as a cause of murder and human misery. The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the opposite sex, who in turn resembles us.
Jared Diamond
#37. Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?
Jared Diamond
#38. Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.
Jared Diamond
#39. 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.
Jared Diamond
#40. But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.
Jared Diamond
#41. All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.
Jared Diamond
#42. I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book ... and I began putting more work into environmental history.
Jared Diamond
#43. Science is often misrepresented as 'the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.' Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
Jared Diamond
#44. My own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery.
Jared Diamond
#45. When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.
Jared Diamond
#46. 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.
Jared Diamond
#47. 1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas,
Jared Diamond
#48. 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.
Jared Diamond
#49. 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.
Jared Diamond
#50. (If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)
Jared Diamond
#52. The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
Jared Diamond
#53. Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.
Jared Diamond
#54. All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
Jared Diamond
#55. Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?
Jared Diamond
#56. Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.
Jared Diamond
#57. Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there's no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that.
Jared Diamond
#58. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Jared Diamond
#59. Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
Jared Diamond
#60. We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
Jared Diamond
#61. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
Jared Diamond
#62. 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.
Jared Diamond
#63. Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.
Jared Diamond
#64. After the arrival of Europeans, the Big Island's King Kamehameha I rapidly proceeded with the consolidation of the largest islands by purchasing European guns and ships to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu.
Jared Diamond
#65. Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? (asked Yali)
Jared Diamond
#66. 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.
Jared Diamond
#67. Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.
(Interview, Sierra Magazine, May/June 2005)
Jared Diamond
#68. 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.
Jared Diamond
#69. Example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span,
Jared Diamond
#70. The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.
Jared Diamond
#71. With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what Id actually achieved in my life with what I would like to achieve and what other people have achieved, and I found that comparison depressing.
Jared Diamond
#72. In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets.
Jared Diamond
#73. 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
Jared Diamond
#74. All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.
Jared Diamond
#75. But receive much less social support from friendships
Jared Diamond
#77. For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
Jared Diamond
#78. Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change.
Jared Diamond
#79. 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?
Jared Diamond
#80. History is not "just one damn fact after another," as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
Jared Diamond
#81. Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.
Jared Diamond
#82. The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.
Jared Diamond
#83. A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.
Jared Diamond
#84. 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.
Jared Diamond
#86. The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.
Jared Diamond
#87. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.
Jared Diamond
#88. or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).
Jared Diamond
#89. Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.
Jared Diamond
#90. Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this country.
Jared Diamond
#91. As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes. Many
Jared Diamond
#92. People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
Jared Diamond
#93. Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and
Jared Diamond
#94. African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.
Jared Diamond
#95. History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves
Jared Diamond
#96. Proposed as appropriate compensation. This reminds me
Jared Diamond
#97. Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.
Jared Diamond
#98. 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.
Jared Diamond
#99. 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?
Jared Diamond
#100. He waited until 1896 to build the first truck.
Jared Diamond
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