Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 7

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

154. “New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world’s land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world’s 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.”

— Jared Diamond

155. “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

156. “For example, Portugal, northern Iran, and Japan, all located at about the same latitude but lying successively 4,000 miles east or west of each other, are more similar to each other in climate than each is to a location lying even a mere 1,000 miles due south.”

— Jared Diamond

157. “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

158. “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

159. “Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.”

— Jared Diamond

160. “THE DISCIPLINE OF history is generally not considered to be a science, but something closer to the humanities. At best, history is classified among the social sciences, of which it rates as the least scientific.”

— Jared Diamond

161. “Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth.”

— Jared Diamond

162. “Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds. All those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.”

— Jared Diamond

163. “Similarly, hippos, as four ton vegetarians, would be great barnyard animals if they weren’t so dangerous. They kill more people each year than do any other African mammals, including even lions.”

— Jared Diamond

164. “Against other illnesses, though – including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox – our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That’s the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.”

— Jared Diamond

165. “The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera – are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.”

— Jared Diamond

166. “Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.”

— Jared Diamond

167. “As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes. Many.”

— Jared Diamond

168. “As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above “barbarians” or “savages.”

— Jared Diamond

169. “Immediate reasons for Pizarro’s success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing. The title of this book will serve as shorthand for those proximate factors, which also enabled modern Europeans to conquer peoples of other continents.”

— Jared Diamond

170. “In case you’re squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall, from my years of living in England in the late 1950s, recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends who kept them for experiments also used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.”

— Jared Diamond

171. “I am Nestor’s delicious drinking cup. Whoever drinks from this cup swiftly will the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite seize him.”

— Jared Diamond

172. “That is, cleaning up pollution is usually far more expensive than preventing pollution, just as doctors usually find it far more expensive and less effective to try to cure already sick patients than to prevent diseases in the first place by cheap, simple public health measures.”

— Jared Diamond

173. “First, Germany’s devastated condition at the time of its surrender of May 7 and 8, 1945 posed the worst crisis faced by any nation discussed in this book. The erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, and the student revolts peaking over several months of 1968, then represented two further crises. Conversely, Perry’s arrival in Japan and Pinochet’s coup in Chile actually weren’t unexpected.”

— Jared Diamond

174. “That news was enough to induce 900 Maori to sail to the Chathams. The outcome clearly illustrates how environments can affect economy, technology, political organization, and fighting skills within a short time.”

— Jared Diamond

175. “Horse. Wild ancestor: now extinct wild horses of southern Russia; a different subspecies of the same species survived in the wild to modern times as Przewalski’s horse of Mongolia. Now worldwide.”

— Jared Diamond

176. “Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and.”

— Jared Diamond

177. “Similarly, throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.”

— Jared Diamond

178. “One reason why technology tends to catalyze itself is that advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems.”

— Jared Diamond

179. “Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings.”

— Jared Diamond

180. “Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Of.”

— Jared Diamond

181. “Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost.”

— Jared Diamond

182. “Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.”

— Jared Diamond

183. “Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zookeepers each year than do tigers! Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope – even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses – because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.”

— Jared Diamond

184. “Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, written.”

— Jared Diamond

185. “This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.”

— Jared Diamond

186. “Thanks to their mastery of horses and rifles, the Plains Indians of North America, the Araucanian Indians of southern Chile, and the Pampas Indians of Argentina fought off invading whites longer than did any other Native Americans, succumbing only to massive army operations by white governments in the 1870s and 1880s.”

— Jared Diamond

187. “I am thus optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs – and with profit to our own society today, by teaching us what shaped the modern world, and what might shape our future.”

— Jared Diamond

188. “Australia stands out from all the other continents: the differences between Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America fade into insignificance compared with the differences between Australia and any of those other landmasses. Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flattest, most infertile, climatically most unpredictable, and biologically most impoverished continent.”

— Jared Diamond

189. “Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.”

— Jared Diamond

190. “When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.”

— Jared Diamond

191. “Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords.”

— Jared Diamond

192. “For instance, the Karimui Basin of the New Guinea highlands, where I worked in the 1960s, was occupied by an isolated population of a few thousand people, suffering from the world’s highest incidence of leprosy – about 40 percent! Finally, small human populations are also susceptible to nonfatal infections against which we don’t develop immunity, with the result that the same person can become reinfected after recovering. That happens with hookworm and many other parasites.”

— Jared Diamond

193. “Protein starvation is probably also the ultimate reason why cannibalism was widespread in traditional New Guinea highland societies.”

— Jared Diamond

194. “Farmers tend to breathe out nastier germs, to own better weapons and armor, to own more-powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest.”

— Jared Diamond

195. “Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.”

— Jared Diamond

196. “Already, though, I hope to have convinced you, the reader, that history is not “just one damn fact after another,” as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.”

— Jared Diamond

197. “Als ik niet meer zou kunnen vissen, zou ik een grote voorraad morfine aanleggen en diep het bos intrekken. Ik zou een afgelegen plek kiezen waar niemand ooit mijn lijk zou vinden en van waaruit ik een prachtig uitzicht zou hebben. Ik zou met mijn gezicht naar dat uitzicht gaan liggen – en mijn morfine nemen.”

— Jared Diamond

198. “The first of these toxic chemicals to achieve wide notice were insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, whose effects on birds, fish, and other animals were publicized by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.”

— Jared Diamond

199. “China’s leaders who mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable.”

— Jared Diamond

200. “This will be a frequent dilemma for historians trying to apply the comparative method to problems of human history: apparently too many potentially independent variables, and far too few separate outcomes to establish those variables’ importance statistically.”

— Jared Diamond