“ The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s. Jared Diamond
“ The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down afte… Jared Diamond
“ But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males. Jared Diamond
“ It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World. Jared Diamond
“ 几乎在世界的每个角落，我的那些搞考古学的朋友都在尽力说服政府了解考古学的实用价值。他们千方百计地想让提供科研经费的机构明白对过去社会命运的研究能帮助我们了解今天同一地区将会发生什么问题。而最重要的是，… Jared Diamond
“ Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. ... By invoking this assu… Jared Diamond
“ In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those su… Jared Diamond
“ In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the wo… Jared Diamond
“ People often ask, What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today? A flip answer would be, The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identif… Jared Diamond
“ In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the wo… Jared Diamond
“ Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop. Jared Diamond
“ Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened. Jared Diamond
“ If our ethical code makes a purely arbitrary distinction between humans and all other species, then we have a code based on naked selfishness devoid of any higher principle. Jared Diamond
“ For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental prob… Jared Diamond
“ [W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order t… Jared Diamond
“ Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions o… Jared Diamond
“ The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get hel… Jared Diamond
“ Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core val… Jared Diamond
