Jared Diamond Quotes
The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
Jared Diamond, Geographer, Anthropologist and Historian, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
For an earlier expression of this idea see Martin Luther King Jr. {292902}, 1963.
Even today, the lack of logic in many fields—especial politics and public policy—has caused an intellectual and emotional rift between scientists and many in government. Bush was one of the great scientists and thinkers in American history. He had advised FDR to go ahead with the research and development program to try and develop an atomic bomb. He was the only Government Official who Roosevelt discussed the idea with. At the time, Bush as a government official supervised and directed many thousands of scientists, and was one of just a few scientists who monitored and advised on the Manhattan Project to develop the Bomb.
Referring to the problem of the necessity of using sophisticated technology and instruments to measure air quality:
Nehru kept two icons on his desk. One was a gold statue of Gandhi and the other was a death cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln.
Jared Mason Diamond is an American geographer, historian, anthropologist, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
