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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific.”

— Jared Diamond

264. “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

265. “The first cameras, typewriters, and television sets were as awful as Otto’s seven-foot-tall gas engine. That makes it difficult for an inventor to foresee whether his or her awful prototype might eventually find a use and thus warrant more time and expense to develop it.”

— Jared Diamond

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “Two contrasting explanations suggest themselves: problems with the local people, or problems with the locally available wild plants.”

— Jared Diamond

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

273. “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

274. “Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?”

— Jared Diamond

275. “It’s the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or were only recently influenced by state government. Its populations span a range of traditional lifestyles, from nomadic hunter-gatherers, seafarers, and lowland sago specialists to settled Highland farmers, composing groups ranging from a few dozen to 200,000 people.”

— Jared Diamond

276. “That’s why the question what men are good for continues to be debated within our societies, as well as between anthropologists.”

— Jared Diamond

277. “Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States’s balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Because Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.”

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

280. “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

281. “A horizontal arrow indicates that the attribute varies between less and more complex societies of that type.”

— Jared Diamond

282. “Not a trace of its use for literature has survived. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted by nonliterate bards for nonliterate listeners, and not committed to writing until the development of the Greek alphabet hundreds of years later.”

— Jared Diamond

283. “For instance, many wood and paper products that are offered to consumers for sale carry labels making pro-environmental claims such as “for every tree felled, at least two are planted.” However, a survey of 80 such claims found that 77 could not be substantiated at all, 3 could be only partially substantiated, and almost all were withdrawn when challenged.”

— Jared Diamond

284. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

286. “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

287. “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

288. “Immediate reasons for Pizarro’s success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing.”

— Jared Diamond

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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