sustainability 5
- Promising developing countries a first-world lifestyle is an impossible promise, a cruel hoax.
- Run sustainably, the world's fisheries could yield at maximum historical rates indefinitely.
Jared Diamond
Geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles; author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005) and Upheaval (2019).
Jared Diamond did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
What Jared Diamond says most about
innovation 3
- Most inventions come from curiosity and tinkering, not from a demand for them
- Invention is often the mother of necessity, not the reverse
agency 2
- We know how to cut consumption; what has been lacking is political will.
- The world's consumption problems can be solved if we choose to.
America 2
- Much American consumption is wasteful and adds little or nothing to quality of life.
- Eurasian germs killed far more Native Americans than Eurasian guns or steel
epidemiology 2
- Closing borders in a pandemic is sound public-health policy.
- COVID-19 is a world problem that requires a world solution.
humility 2
- We can learn from the mistakes of distant and past peoples
- Industrialized states are not to be assumed better than hunter-gatherer tribes
optimism 2
- The world's consumption problems can be solved if we choose to.
- About the world's future, cautious optimism is warranted
racism 2
- Racist explanations of history are not only loathsome but wrong
- History took different courses because of environments, not biological differences between peoples