Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

155. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

157. “For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure. The.”

— Jared Diamond

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “In reality, Japanese women face many societal barriers to equality. Of course, the barriers that I’ll now describe also exist in countries other than Japan. But those barriers are stronger – and the gender gap in health, education, and participation in the workforce and in politics is greater – in Japan than in any other rich industrialized nation except South Korea.”

— Jared Diamond

188. “Humans and most animal species make an unhappy marriage, for one or more of many possible reasons: the animal’s diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization. Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans, by virtue of compatibility on all those separate counts.”

— Jared Diamond

189. “I do not mean to imply, however, that the role of disease in history was confined to paving the way for European expansion. Malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases of tropical Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea furnished the most important obstacle to European colonization of those tropical areas.”

— Jared Diamond

190. “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

191. “My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed. For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families.”

— Jared Diamond

192. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

194. “My best-case scenario for the future is that China’s government will recognize that its environmental problems pose an even graver threat that did its problem of population growth. It may then conclude that China’s interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively carried out, as its family planning policies.”

— Jared Diamond

195. “The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.”

— Jared Diamond

196. “Eurasia’s east–west major axis, unlike the Americas’ north–south major axis, permitted diffusion without change in latitude and associated environmental variables. In contrast to Eurasia’s consistent east–west breadth, the New World was constricted over the whole length of Central America and especially at Panama.”

— Jared Diamond

197. “About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa’s Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.”

— Jared Diamond

198. “Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

200. “Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject.”

— Jared Diamond