Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— 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. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

177. “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

178. “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

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. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one’s own choices as one was growing up.”

— Jared Diamond

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and conventionally known as Java man.”

— Jared Diamond

190. “Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.”

— Jared Diamond

191. “Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.”

— Jared Diamond

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “The population that I already mentioned as having the world’s lowest recorded salt intake, Brazil’s Yanomamo Indians, also had the world’s lowest average blood pressure, an astonishingly low 96 over 61.”

— Jared Diamond

196. “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

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

— 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. “Part of the solution to that problem was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force.”

— Jared Diamond

200. “Het resultaat was een dieet dat zeer rijk was aan koolhydraten, wat nog werd verergerd doordat de eilanders de beperkte hoeveelheid zoet water op het eiland compenseerden door grote hoeveelheden sap van suikerriet te drinken. Geen enkele tandards zou ervan opkijken wanneer de Paaseilanders de meeste gaatjes en andere vormen van tandbederf vertoonden van alle prehistorische volkeren.”

— Jared Diamond