Quotes
2,628 quote
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
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Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
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?
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
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 to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
It's 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.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
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, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
The challenge now is to develop human history as a science.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
If ... Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged ... Eurasians would be ... reduced to ... fragments.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Thanks to the achievements of East Asia's first farmers, China became Chinese.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Food production, and competition and diffusion between societies, led as ultimate causes ... of conquest.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
No waves of native grain ever stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of North America.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Jared Diamond, Ph.D. (UCLA)
•
Guns, Germs And Steel
History, Science