Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords.”

— Jared Diamond

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

228. “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

229. “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

230. “When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed.”

— Jared Diamond

231. “If one defines “big” as “weighing over 100 pounds,” then only 14 such species were domesticated before the twentieth century.”

— Jared Diamond

232. “Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.”

— Jared Diamond

233. “The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the first arriving humans. Recall.”

— Jared Diamond

234. “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to His coattails as He marches past.”

— Jared Diamond

235. “They suggest that there are two contrasting types of approaches to solving environmental problems, which we may term the bottom-up and the top-down approach.”

— Jared Diamond

236. “That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process – one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started.”

— Jared Diamond

237. “That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn’t arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else.”

— Jared Diamond

238. “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

239. “10. Flexible personality 11. Individual core values 12. Freedom from personal constraints.”

— Jared Diamond

240. “That envoy saw the Spaniards at their most disorganized, told Atahuallpa that they were not fighting men, and that he could tie them all up if given 200 Indians.”

— Jared Diamond

241. “Hence one can think of a crisis as a moment of truth: a turning point, when conditions before and after that “moment” are “much more” different from one another than before and after “most” other moments.”

— Jared Diamond

242. “By comparison with high population densities in Japan and Java and China, Australia looked empty and attractive to Asian invasion – so thought the prime minister, but Asians themselves did not think that way.”

— Jared Diamond

243. “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

244. “Thus, part – not all, but part – of the reason for Japan initiating World War Two against such hopeless odds was that young army leaders of the 1930’s lacked the knowledge base and historical experience necessary for honest, realistic, cautious self-appraisal. The result was disastrous for Japan.”

— Jared Diamond

245. “Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.”

— Jared Diamond

246. “Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.”

— Jared Diamond

247. “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

248. “Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture.”

— Jared Diamond

249. “Inventors often have to persist at their tinkering for a long time in the absence of public demand, because early models perform too poorly to be useful.”

— Jared Diamond

250. “The Anasazi collapse and other southwestern collapses offer us not only a gripping story but also an instructive one for the purposes of this book, illustrating well our themes of human environmental impact and climate change intersecting, environmental and population problems spilling over into warfare, the strengths but also the dangers of complex non-self-sufficient societies dependent on imports and exports, and societies collapsing swiftly after attaining peak population numbers and power.”

— Jared Diamond