Top 300 Jared Diamond Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 7

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

— Jared Diamond

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

278. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

280. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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