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Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2025 Update)
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Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “It turned out that successful attempts were more likely than unsuccessful attempts to be followed by a change in national political institutions.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “Against other illnesses, though – including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox – our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That’s the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “I am Nestor’s delicious drinking cup. Whoever drinks from this cup swiftly will the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite seize him.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “Two contrasting explanations suggest themselves: problems with the local people, or problems with the locally available wild plants.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “A horizontal arrow indicates that the attribute varies between less and more complex societies of that type.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “Benjamin Jones at Northwestern University and Benjamin Olken of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “What is it that promotes an invention’s acceptance by a society?”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zookeepers each year than do tigers! Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope – even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses – because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “That’s why the question what men are good for continues to be debated within our societies, as well as between anthropologists.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “Crops starting out as weeds included rye and oats, turnips and radishes, beets and leeks, and lettuce.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera – are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “First, Germany’s devastated condition at the time of its surrender of May 7 and 8, 1945 posed the worst crisis faced by any nation discussed in this book. The erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, and the student revolts peaking over several months of 1968, then represented two further crises. Conversely, Perry’s arrival in Japan and Pinochet’s coup in Chile actually weren’t unexpected.”
Jared Diamond Quote: “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 Quote: “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.”
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