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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

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

— Jared Diamond

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

271. “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

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

— 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. “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

276. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

278. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Jared Diamond

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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