Jared Diamond Quotes

90 quotes in 1688 categories

• Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.
• 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.
• In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate…
• 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…
• The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
• 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…
• Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve…
• A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.
• The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
• Australia is the most isolated continent.
• All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
• Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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