Jared Diamond Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Easter #Ocean #Islands

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

#Simplicity #Consistency #Complicated

“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 planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Reflection #Two #Long

“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

#Trying #Population #Warfare

“Technology has to be invented or adopted.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Technology #Adopted

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

#Animal #Unique #Choices

“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 where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Water #People #Community

“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 of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Technology #Years #Land

“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

#America #Chicago #Steel

“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

#People #Focus #Important

“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

#Epidemics #World #Modern

“[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

#Crush #Religious #Patriotic

“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

#Baby #Sex #Oil

“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 the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other—by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Sacrifice #Self #Two

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

#Rhinos #Troops #Empires

“In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Government #Religion #Latter

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

#Facts #Roles #Today

“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 one part of Eurasia could easily spread thousands of miles at the same latitude, encountering the same day-length and climate to which they were already adapted.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Axes #Climate #East

“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

#Crops #Natal #Enormous

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

#Conflict #Humans

“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

#Differences #Environmental #Making A Difference

“[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

#People #Triumph #Inappropriate

“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

#Loss #Literature #Individual

“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

#Thinking #Islands #Space

“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

#Disease #Tribes #Population

“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 due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Real #Animal #Europe

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”
-- Jared Diamond

#Differences #History #Different

“Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.”
-- Jared Diamond

#Gorillas #Way #Chimpanzees

“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

#Acquisition #World #Body

“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

#Years #Acting #Twenties