Jared Diamond Quotes

The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different conti...

...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societi...

[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values t...

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the wor...

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrast...

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many...

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the b...

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environme...

(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 ...

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into t...

But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females r...

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all ...

I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn som...

Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, ...

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. A...

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those...

Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern socie...

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find importan...

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, ...

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. Tha...

Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the t...

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter...

The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the m...

Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death...

Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they...

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world'...

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fana...

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Cresce...

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmer...

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in...

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-susta...

For any ranked society, whether a chiefdom or a state, one thus has to ask, why do the commoners tol...

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest...

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controll...