Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They.”

— Jared Diamond

102. “Take air quality in the United States today: It’s about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.”

— Jared Diamond

103. “After people reached Australia, that continent lost its giant kangaroos, its ‘marsupial lion’, and other giant marsupials.”

— Jared Diamond

104. “If our ethical code makes a purely arbitrary distinction between humans and all other species, then we have a code based on naked selfishness devoid of any higher principle.”

— Jared Diamond

105. “Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits.”

— Jared Diamond

106. “The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise. As I previously.”

— Jared Diamond

107. “The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.”

— Jared Diamond

108. “Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I’m optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.”

— Jared Diamond

109. “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 environmental laws we’ve got in this country.”

— Jared Diamond

110. “African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead.”

— Jared Diamond

111. “Chauncey Starr expressed it, “We are loath to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves.”

— Jared Diamond

112. “In areas where there were only hunter-gatherers to begin with, those groups of hunter-gatherers who adopted food production outbred those who didn’t.”

— Jared Diamond

113. “In effect, the Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.”

— Jared Diamond

114. “Glorious Revolution overthrew King James, made William king in his place, weakened the king’s power, increased Parliament’s power, and thereby promoted the development of institutions more favorable for economic growth.”

— Jared Diamond

115. “Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I’m not saying it in a moral sense. I’m just saying it in the sense of what is it that’s really going to bring change.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

117. “New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat. Protein.”

— Jared Diamond

118. “Ego strength includes being able to tolerate strong emotions, to keep focused under stress, to express yourself freely, to perceive reality accurately, and to make sound decisions.”

— Jared Diamond

119. “Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest;.”

— Jared Diamond

120. “Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.”

— Jared Diamond

121. “Here, the results of recent molecular biological studies are illuminating in linking germs to the rise of food production, in Eurasia much more than in the Americas.”

— Jared Diamond

122. “Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.”

— Jared Diamond

123. “Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society’s birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death – and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies.”

— Jared Diamond

124. “We can’t manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can’t start and stop ice ages, and we can’t experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.”

— Jared Diamond

125. “Commoners had to prostrate themselves before high-ranking chiefs. All the members of chiefly lineages, bureaucrats, and some craft specialists were freed from the work of food production.”

— Jared Diamond

126. “Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?”

— Jared Diamond

127. “IN ALL, OF the world’s 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals – the candidates for domestication – only 14 passed the test. Why did the other 134 species fail? To which conditions was Francis Galton referring, when he spoke of those other species as “destined to perpetual wildness”?”

— Jared Diamond

128. “The slaughter at Gallipoli symbolized the national pride of Australians, now fighting for their British motherland as Australians, not as Victorians or Tasmanians or South Australians – and the emotional dedication with which Australians publicly identified themselves as loyal British subjects.”

— Jared Diamond

129. “The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. “Modern” conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history; all human societies have been traditional for far longer than any society has been modern.”

— Jared Diamond

130. “Those protohumans are generally known as Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence.”

— Jared Diamond

131. “We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.”

— Jared Diamond

132. “But the question for our purposes is whether the broad pattern of world history would have been altered significantly if some genius inventor had not been born at a particular place and time. The answer is clear: there has never been any such person. All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.”

— Jared Diamond

133. “Although the first known human cases in the United States appeared only as recently as 1962, Lyme disease is already reaching epidemic proportions in many parts of our country.”

— Jared Diamond

134. “Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band’s own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands. With the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings, and bureaucrats. Such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains but also to maintaining standing armies, sending out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars of conquest.”

— Jared Diamond

135. “Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might otherwise have been candidates for domestication, and left native Australians and New Guineans with not a single native domestic animal.”

— Jared Diamond

136. “The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal’s gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow on the latrine sites of aardvarks.”

— Jared Diamond

137. “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?”

— Jared Diamond

138. “In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities. Hence moderate-sized agricultural societies are often organized in chiefdoms, and kingdoms are confined to large agricultural societies. Those complex political units are much better able to mount a sustained war of conquest than is an egalitarian band of hunters.”

— Jared Diamond

139. “Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population.”

— Jared Diamond

140. “If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them no so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.”

— Jared Diamond

141. “Maori began to walk through Moriori settlements, announcing that the Moriori were now their slaves, and killing those who objected.”

— Jared Diamond

142. “The reasons that Europeans colonized New Guinea, rather than vice versa, are obvious. Europeans were the ones who had the oceangoing ships and compasses to travel to New Guinea; the writing systems and printing presses to produce maps, descriptive accounts, and administrative paperwork useful in establishing control over New Guinea; the political institutions to organize the ships, soldiers, and administration; and the guns to shoot New Guineans who resisted with bow and arrow and clubs.”

— Jared Diamond

143. “Consequences are that heavy TV viewers trust other people less, and join fewer voluntary organizations, than do people who are not heavy TV viewers. Before blaming TV-viewing for those behaviors, one might object: which is the cause and which is the result, or are the two sets of phenomena just correlated without either being the cause of the other?”

— Jared Diamond

144. “The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.”

— Jared Diamond

145. “New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.”

— Jared Diamond

146. “But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world’s 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.”

— Jared Diamond

147. “Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals played decisive roles in the European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific islanders.”

— Jared Diamond

148. “Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.”

— Jared Diamond

149. “Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”

— Jared Diamond

150. “That might have led to an Easter-Island–like catastrophe. Instead, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and much more nearly sustainable resource consumption rates. The shift was led from the top by successive shoguns, who invoked Confucian principles to promulgate an official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to protect the country against disaster.”

— Jared Diamond