Jared Diamond Quotes

The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.

Globalization is exposing new fault lines - between urban and rural communities, for example.

We have such a great civilization.

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

Geography determines the course of history.

History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.

When you live in Vancouver, you realize most of the population is in eastern North America.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.

There aren't many people who say that Europe is a territory, or Asia is a territory - it'd be suicide. And there are even more people in America than in Europe. I think it's strange, really. I basically see it as loads of different places.

In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.

Seeking fortunes in America led to Germany losing people, and the American continent received many people whose contributions are particularly clear in the agricultural and technical fields.

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another.

I think the implications for the rise of China are huge in terms of the political landscape, economic balance, de-velopment thinking, and the environment.

I know about technology, about research, scientific applications, culture, civilization, differences between nations of the world, the nature of history.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

During the civilisation and development process of more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation has made an indelible contribution to the civilisation and advancement of mankind.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth's surface. In millions of years, their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere, and themselves.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.

We cannot turn back the tides of globalization any more than King Knute [995-1035] could turn back the tides.

The striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the people themselves but to differences in their environments.

Civic rationality and modern capitalism triumphed in the medieval northern European cities – but not in Chinese, Indian or Muslim cities