Jared Diamond quotes - page 2

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. (Jared Diamond)
My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference. View quote
Jared Diamond
Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for grabs, lying in our own hands. We don't need new technologies to solve our problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the most part we "just" need the political will to apply solutions already available. View quote
Jared Diamond
Those numbers ay not sound like a bid deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age. View quote
Jared Diamond
Remember that impact is the product of two factors: population multiplied times impact per person. View quote
Jared Diamond
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history. View quote
Jared Diamond
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq. View quote
Jared Diamond
The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others. View quote
Jared Diamond
Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent cause of disastrous behaviour. [...] The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense [...] It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined [...]. View quote
Jared Diamond
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 practising behaviors that the public didn't 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. View quote
Jared Diamond
Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability. (Jared Diamond)
We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific. View quote
Jared Diamond
Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation. View quote
Jared Diamond
Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique. View quote
Jared Diamond
WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us. View quote
Jared Diamond
Australia is the most isolated continent. View quote
Jared Diamond
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 is why we have the global problems we face today. View quote
Jared Diamond
I personally am not conscious of my accent. View quote
Jared Diamond
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? View quote
Jared Diamond
I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history. View quote
Jared Diamond
Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure. (Jared Diamond)
The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa. View quote
Jared Diamond
Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north. View quote
Jared Diamond
The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan. View quote
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. View quote
Jared Diamond