Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

257. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to this debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention. Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.”

— Jared Diamond

265. “One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.”

— Jared Diamond

266. “China’s achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact. But it is doubtful whether even the world’s current human resource use and impact can be sustained. Something has to give way.”

— Jared Diamond

267. “One common response of ours to infection is to develop a fever. Again, we’re used to considering fever as a “symptom of disease,” as if it developed inevitably without serving any function. But regulation of body temperature is under our genetic control and doesn’t just happen by accident. A few microbes are more sensitive to heat than our own bodies are. By raising our body temperature, we in effect try to bake the germs to death before we get baked ourselves.”

— Jared Diamond

268. “What is it that promotes an invention’s acceptance by a society?”

— Jared Diamond

269. “It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die rather than to compromise and live?”

— Jared Diamond

270. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

272. “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

273. “The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.”

— Jared Diamond

274. “Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.”

— Jared Diamond

275. “To sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning. Hence measles and similar diseases are also known as crowd diseases.”

— Jared Diamond

276. “These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.”

— Jared Diamond

277. “That contrast between the immediate virtues of wheat and barley and the difficulties posed by teosinte may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of New World and Eurasian human societies.”

— Jared Diamond

278. “7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints.”

— Jared Diamond

279. “1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle;.”

— Jared Diamond

280. “Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.”

— Jared Diamond

281. “An example of a much more difficult invention is writing, which does not suggest itself by observation of any natural material. As we saw in Chapter 12, it had only a few independent origins, and the alphabet arose apparently only once in world history.”

— Jared Diamond

282. “As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance – just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.”

— Jared Diamond

283. “Atahuallpa’s presence at Cajamarca thus highlights one of the key factors in world history: diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, by decimating many peoples on other continents.”

— Jared Diamond

284. “That acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to create their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those amenities as public services to everyone else.”

— Jared Diamond

285. “That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren’t painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.”

— Jared Diamond

286. “In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance – just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.”

— Jared Diamond

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “Something big and bad suddenly happening motivates us more than do slowly developing problems, and also more than the prospect of something big and bad happening in the future. I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s saying: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

— Jared Diamond

291. “Allende had good ideas, but he executed them poorly. Although he correctly recognized Chile’s problems, he adopted wrong solutions to those problems.”

— Jared Diamond

292. “From all that experience, Icelanders took away the conclusion: This is not a country in which we can enjoy the luxury of experimenting. We live in a fragile land; we know that our ways will allow at least some of us to survive; don’t ask us to change.”

— Jared Diamond

293. “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

294. “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

295. “Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.”

— Jared Diamond

296. “Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti.”

— Jared Diamond

297. “We calculate that our urgings of the coauthors of those com- pleted volumes cost us on the average, per volume, two friendships for life and several more friendships for at least a decade.”

— Jared Diamond

298. “Crops starting out as weeds included rye and oats, turnips and radishes, beets and leeks, and lettuce.”

— Jared Diamond

299. “Toen de bewoners van Paaseiland in de problemen kwamen, konden ze nergens heen, was er niemand bij wie ze hulp konden zoeken – en wij moderne aardbewoners zullen evenmin elders ons heil kunnen zoeken als onze problemen groter worden. Dat zijn de redenen waarom mensen de ondergang van Paaseiland zien als een metafoor, een doemscenario voor wat ons in onze eigen toekomst misschien te wachten staat.”

— Jared Diamond

300. “A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana.”

— Jared Diamond