Jared Diamond Quotes

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

The world has changed profoundly since our programs were first established.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

For a long time in the United States, in practice if not in principle, only white, male, Protestants were born free and equal.

Civilizations are a matter of the mind.

Give us 20 years, and you'll not recognize this country!

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.

Geography determines social development …. But geography may be losing much of its meaning.

The promise of our country is that the rules are fair.

Each culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent possibilities of human life can unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety..

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

As history unfolds, as cultures evolve, of course the intelligences which they value change.

Culture is an output of a bunch of inputs that have to come together the right way. Specifically, it is the collision of people and their context, how they interact with each other in that context, and then how that context evolves based on those interactions as they multiply.

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.