All Jared Diamond Quotes
- 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… Advantage
- Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation. Affecting
- 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… Careful
- 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… Advance
- Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices. Among
- In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was… Accidents
- History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves Among
- Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened. Bantu
- Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread… Adopting
- 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… Acquired
- In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles… Action
- The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could… Able
- History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency. Complicated
- 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… Answer
- Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term… Been
- [T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs. Cling
- 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… Antidote
- Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots. Conflict
- [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… Accept
- 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… Ago