Jared Diamond

Knowledge is the true organ of sight not the eyes

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

“The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.”

— Jared Diamond

Australia is the most isolated continent.

— Jared Diamond

One person making a wrong decision affects the whole country.

— Jared Diamond

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

— Jared Diamond

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

“Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? (asked Yali)”

— Jared Diamond

The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we…

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with…

— Jared Diamond

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The…

— Jared Diamond

Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to…

— Jared Diamond

“food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the…

— Jared Diamond

“Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were…

— Jared Diamond

Eurasia's main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia's east/west axis meant that species domesticated in…

— Jared Diamond

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of…

— Jared Diamond

“As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would…

— Jared Diamond

“Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and…

— Jared Diamond

“NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS TENDED TO INTERPRET history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Key hallmarks of this transition included the development of…

— Jared Diamond

“Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled…

— Jared Diamond

“INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to…

— Jared Diamond

“Against other illnesses, though—including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox—our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That’s…

— Jared Diamond

“New Guinea’s laughing sickness, transmitted by cannibalism and caused by a slow-acting virus from which no one has ever recovered. Kuru was…

— Jared Diamond

“In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking…

— Jared Diamond

“Those parasites pass to a person from an eaten animal, but the virus causing laughing sickness (kuru) in the New Guinea highlands…

— Jared Diamond

“Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was…

— Jared Diamond

“To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and…

— Jared Diamond

“We come to conquer this land by his command, that all may come to a knowledge of God and of His Holy…

— Jared Diamond

“Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing…

— Jared Diamond

“New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into…

— Jared Diamond

“For example, missionary linguists are working on modified Roman alphabets for hundreds of New Guinea and Native American languages. Government linguists devised…

— Jared Diamond

“SO MUCH FOR our dispassionate examination of the germ’s interests. Now let’s get back to considering our own selfish interests: to stay…

— Jared Diamond

“Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and…

— Jared Diamond

“The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for…

— Jared Diamond