Jared Diamond Short Quotes

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Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

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

Jared Diamond
The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Jared Diamond
In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.

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In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.

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

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

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Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

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

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Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance being murdered as the average human.

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The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

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The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

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It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

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Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits

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History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves

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