Quotes by Jared Diamond

“Its striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.”

“Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology wont create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.”

“Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.”

“Humans have been evolving for millions of years longer in Africa than in Europe, and even anatomically modern Homo sapiens may have reached Europe from Africa only within the last 50,000 years. If time were a critical factor in the development of human societies, Africa should have enjoyed an enormous head start and advantage over Europe.”

“We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about.”

“Most people are explicitly racists. In parts of the world - so called educated, so-called western society - weve learned that it is not polite to be racist, and so often we dont express racist views, but... Racism is one of the big issues in the world today. Racism is the big social problem in the United States.”

“How is it that Pizarro and Cortes reached the New World at all, before Aztec and Inca conquistadors could reach Europe? That outcome depended partly on technology in the form of oceangoing ships. Europeans had such ships, while the Aztecs and Incas did not.”

“Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.”

“Differences between the Old and New Worlds in domesticated plants,especially in large-seeded cereals, are qualitatively similar to the differences in domesticated mammals, though the difference is not so extreme.”

“Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.”

[W]hat 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.

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the worlds most troubled areas.

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

(On the beginning of the mid-1990s genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwandas total population, had been killed.

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didnt want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses environmental practices.

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

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.