243 Quotes by 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

The problem is that only a tiny minority of wild plants and animals lend themselves to domestication, and those few are concentrated in about half a dozen parts of the world.

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?

Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I’m not saying it in a moral sense. I’m just saying it in the sense of what is it that’s really going to bring change.

Pizarro captured Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the two leaders first set eyes on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom – enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet – was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That’s increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.

Commoners had to prostrate themselves before high-ranking chiefs. All the members of chiefly lineages, bureaucrats, and some craft specialists were freed from the work of food production.

All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.