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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

209. “Farmers tend to breathe out nastier germs, to own better weapons and armor, to own more-powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest.”

— Jared Diamond

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

222. “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

223. “A view intermediate between the Great-Man view and the leaders-don’t-matter view is exemplified by the German sociologist Max.”

— Jared Diamond

224. “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

225. “We tend to have strong inhibitions about being rude to a live human who is two feet away from us, and whom we can see and hear. But we lose those inhibitions when people are reduced to words on a screen.”

— Jared Diamond

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “As the Bitterroot’s water commissioner, Vern Woolsey, explained it succinctly to me, “Whenever you have a source of water and more than two people using it, there will be a problem. But why fight about water? Fighting won’t make more water!”

— Jared Diamond

230. “Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.”

— Jared Diamond

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

236. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents.”

— Jared Diamond

248. “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

249. “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

250. “The UCLA historian Christopher Ehret has applied this linguistic approach to determining the sequence in which domestic plants and animals became utilized by the people of each African language family. By a method termed glotto-chronology, based on calculations of how rapidly words tend to change over historical time, comparative linguistics can even yield estimated dates for domestications or crop arrivals.”

— Jared Diamond