Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jared Diamond

2. “Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.”

— Jared Diamond

3. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

5. “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

6. “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

7. “THE IMPORTANCE OF lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans’ conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors’ morale.”

— Jared Diamond

8. “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

9. “The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.”

— Jared Diamond

10. “Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness. This.”

— Jared Diamond

11. “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.”

— Jared Diamond

12. “Technology has to be invented or adopted.”

— Jared Diamond

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?”

— Jared Diamond

16. “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

17. “Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka.”

— Jared Diamond

18. “Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican.”

— Jared Diamond

19. “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

20. “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

21. “We’re uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It’s classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.”

— Jared Diamond

22. “Yes, world history is indeed such an onion!”

— Jared Diamond

23. “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

24. “WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies.”

— Jared Diamond

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

29. “A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

31. “What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.”

— Jared Diamond

32. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Winston Churchill’s corresponding quip was “Never let a good crisis go to waste!” A.”

— Jared Diamond

33. “I’d rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.”

— Jared Diamond

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34. “It’s striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.”

— Jared Diamond

35. “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”

— Jared Diamond

36. “Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions.”

— Jared Diamond

37. “All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.”

— Jared Diamond

38. “One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.”

— Jared Diamond

39. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

41. “Yes, world history is indeed such an onion! But that peeling back of the onion’s layers is fascinating, challenging – and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to grasp our past’s lessons for our future.”

— Jared Diamond

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.”

— Jared Diamond

47. “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

48. “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”

— Jared Diamond

49. “Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats and hereditary chiefs, and to have small-scale political organization at the level of the band or tribe. That’s because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers are obliged to devote much of their time to acquiring food.”

— Jared Diamond

50. “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 final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.”

— Jared Diamond