Jared Diamond Quotes

Every decision that they take has enormous consequences, and ripple out from the White House.

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

You don’t realize until years later, actually, how doing the wrong thing at the right time could have changed history.

Hasty work and premature decisions may lead to penalties out of all proportion to the issues immediately involved.

Sometimes people fail to see that individual decisions have universal consequences.

It's always the little decisions that have the biggest impact.

If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

Think well before selecting your leader, and when you have selected him, follow him. But in case you find his policy detrimental to your interests, kick him out.

It's easy to be popular when you don't make the decisions a president makes. And it's easy to be unpopular when you're the president because you're making decisions that at the time might seem unpopular; but when historians sort it out, it changes.

By reading, you learn through others' experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

Everyone knows what it's like to make the wrong decision for the right reasons. For me, wrong decisions are the heart of drama - a character who's always making the right decisions is boring.

I've always been drawn to the idea that small choices in our lives could have drastic effects on our future.

I'm aware of the fact that people that are watching to see what I do next - It's challenging to make the best decisions, and I don't always get it right.

Ramifications of small decisions can be pretty large.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

Every action and decision we take – or don’t – ripples into the future. For the first time we have the capability, the technology, and the knowledge to direct these ripples.

We can't retract the decisions we've made, we can only affect the decisions we're going to make from here.

Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it.

Be decisive. A wrong decision is generally less disastrous than indecision.

You gain or lose power according to the choices that you make.

You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything.

Like a stone thrown into a pond, a good deed can create ripples that extend far beyond the initial splash.

In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the: process: by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong-surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

By your hand, millions - billions - of lives will be altered, caught up in a chain of events begun by you this day.