Quotes by Jared Diamond

“[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 orde...”

“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 a...”

“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 Rwanda'...”

“The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get h...”

“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 mo...”

“Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which ...”

“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 relia...”

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

“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 cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.”

“The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. Th...”

“But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.”

“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 ...”

“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 Gree...”

“...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.”

“Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary t...”

“For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental p...”