Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers – typically, 10 to 100 times more – than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.”

— Jared Diamond

152. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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. “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

164. “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

165. “Education is a process involving two sets of participants who supposedly play different roles: teachers who impart knowledge to students, and students who absorb knowledge from teachers. In fact, as every open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers’ assumptions and by asking questions that the teachers hadn’t previously thought of.”

— Jared Diamond

166. “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

167. “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

168. “Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention’s mother.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

173. “Table 1.1. Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one’s personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience.”

— 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. “Dat wil zeggen dat de problemen van Montana voor het grootste deel niet eenvoudigweg kunnen worden toegeschreven aan zelfzuchtige booswichten die willens en wetens profiteren van hun buren. In plaats daarvan zijn het conflicten tusseen mensen die vanuit hun achtergrond en normen kiezen voor een manier van doen die verschilt van die waar mensen met een andere achtergrond en andere waarden voor kiezen.”

— Jared Diamond

176. “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

177. “From a patent lawyer’s perspective, the ideal invention is one that arises without any precursors, like Athene springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. In.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

179. “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

180. “Scientists used to quote a phrase of Thomas Hobbes’s in order to characterize the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as “nasty, brutish, and short.” They seemed to have to work hard, to be driven by the daily quest for food, often to be close to starvation, to lack such elementary material comforts as soft beds and adequate clothing, and to die young.”

— Jared Diamond

181. “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

182. “Montana farmers today who continue to farm into their old age do it in part because they love the lifestyle and take great pride in it. As Tim Huls told me, “It’s a wonderful lifestyle to get up before dawn and see the sunrise, to watch hawks fly overhead, and to see deer jump through your hay field to avoid your haying equipment.”

— Jared Diamond

183. “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

184. “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

185. “In short, the explanation of why Iceland became the European country with the most serious ecological damage is not that cautious Norwegian and British immigrants suddenly threw caution to the winds when they landed in Iceland, but that they found themselves in an apparently lush but actually fragile environment for which their Norwegian and British experience had failed to prepare them.”

— Jared Diamond

186. “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

187. “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

188. “In human societies possessing domestic animals, livestock fed more people in four distinct ways: by furnishing meat, milk, and fertilizer and by pulling plows.”

— Jared Diamond

189. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

191. “The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history’s broadest pattern.”

— Jared Diamond

192. “Evidently, Austronesian settlers in the New Guinea region got the idea of “tattooing” their pots, perhaps inspired by geometric designs that they had already been using on their bark cloth and body tattoos. This style is termed Lapita pottery, after an archaeological site named Lapita, where it was described.”

— Jared Diamond

193. “In a society that espouses tolerance, it’s amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.”

— Jared Diamond

194. “In Africa as elsewhere in the world, some peoples were much “luckier” than others, in the suites of domesticable wild plant and animal species that they inherited from their environment.”

— Jared Diamond

195. “Thus, it is untrue that there are continents whose societies have tended to be innovative and continents whose societies have tended to be conservative. On any continent, at any given time, there are innovative societies and also conservative ones. In addition, receptivity to innovation fluctuates in time within the same region.”

— Jared Diamond

196. “Descendants of those societies that achieved centralized government and organized religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world. The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history’s broadest pattern.”

— Jared Diamond

197. “Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.”

— Jared Diamond

198. “Without diffusion, fewer technologies are acquired, and more existing technologies are lost.”

— Jared Diamond

199. “Societies with effective conflict resolution, sound decision making, and harmonious economic redistribution can develop better technology, concentrate their military power, seize larger and more productive territories, and crush autonomous smaller societies one by one.”

— Jared Diamond

200. “For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?”

— Jared Diamond