Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

206. “The first state arose in the Fertile Crescent around 3400 BC, and others.”

— Jared Diamond

207. “Traditionally, the sole animal raised on a large scale for food in Japan has been the pig; sheep and goats have never been significant, and cattle were raised for pulling plows and carts but not for food. Japanese-raised beef remains a luxury food of the wealthy few, selling for up to $100 per pound.”

— Jared Diamond

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

213. “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

214. “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. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.”

— Jared Diamond

215. “This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

217. “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

218. “Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent’s first farmers came to meet humanity’s basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.”

— Jared Diamond

219. “The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world’s most populous nation, China. Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople.”

— Jared Diamond

220. “For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.”

— Jared Diamond

221. “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

222. “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

223. “The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence.”

— Jared Diamond

224. “Elk jaar organiseerde men in Orongo een wedstrijd waarbij mannen de koude, anderhalve kilometer brede zeestraat tussen Paaseiland en de kleine eilandjes, waarin het wemelde van de haaien, moesten overzwemmen om het eerste ei van de bonte stern te zoeken, vervolgens moest terugzwemmen naar Paaseiland zonder dat het ei brak, waarna de gelukkige werd gezalfd tot ‘vogelman’ van het jaar.”

— Jared Diamond

225. “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?”

— Jared Diamond

226. “In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools.”

— Jared Diamond

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “The greatest single epidemic in human history was the one of influenza that killed 21 million people at the end of the First World War.”

— Jared Diamond

236. “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

237. “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

238. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

— Jared Diamond

239. “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

240. “We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar’s chiefs and Los Angeles’s yellow tape.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

243. “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

244. “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

245. “Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.”

— Jared Diamond

246. “Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history.”

— Jared Diamond

247. “It turned out that successful attempts were more likely than unsuccessful attempts to be followed by a change in national political institutions.”

— Jared Diamond

248. “Patents and other property laws, protecting ownership rights of inventors, reward innovation in the modern West, while the lack of such protection discourages it in modern China.”

— Jared Diamond

249. “Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick. Yet their stone tools were still crude by comparison with modern New Guineans’ polished stone axes and were usually not yet made in standardized diverse shapes, each with a clearly recognizable function. The.”

— Jared Diamond

250. “The grimmest examples of germs’ role in history come from the European conquest of the Americas that began with Columbus’s voyage of 1492. Numerous as were the Native American victims of the murderous Spanish conquistadores, they were far outnumbered by the victims of murderous Spanish microbes.”

— Jared Diamond