Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 7

201. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity.”

— Jared Diamond

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

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

— Jared Diamond

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

235. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

237. “Benjamin Jones at Northwestern University and Benjamin Olken of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

— Jared Diamond

238. “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

239. “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

240. “Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

250. “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