Jared Diamond Quotes

With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what I'd actually achieved in my life with what I would like to achieve and what other people have achieved, and I found that comparison depressing. - Jared Diamond

Why, for instance, only 2 per cent of Europeans contract the disease as opposed to 13 per cent of African Americans, 17 per cent of U.S. Latinos and up to 50 per cent of Native Americans. - Jared Diamond

Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication. - Jared Diamond

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? - Jared Diamond

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didn't have anthropologists. - Jared Diamond

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific. - Jared Diamond

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. - Jared Diamond

We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs. - Jared Diamond

Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers. - Jared Diamond

Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there's no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that. - Jared Diamond

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