Quotes from Jared Diamond

The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.

farmers are sedentary and live amid their own sewage, thus

literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trap and Atahuallpa to walk into it. THUS

la epidemia desaparece por alguna entre varias razones, como ser curada por la medicina moderna o ser detenida cuando toda la población ha sido infectada ya y, bien se ha inmunizado, bien ha muerto.

Immediate reasons for Pizarro's success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing. The title of this book will serve as shorthand for those proximate factors, which also enabled modern Europeans to conquer peoples of other continents.

One can't merely content oneself with identifying proximate causes; one also has to ask about ultimate causes.

Nosotros y nuestros patógenos estamos encerrados ahora en una escalada de competición evolutiva, con la muerte de un contendiente como precio de la derrota y con la selección natural desempeñando el papel de árbitro.

My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can't afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.

Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.

Commoners had to prostrate themselves before high-ranking chiefs. All the members of chiefly lineages, bureaucrats, and some craft specialists were freed from the work of food production.

Patents and other property laws, protecting ownership rights of inventors, reward innovation in the modern West, while the lack of such protection discourages it in modern China.

example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span

Chauncey Starr expressed it, "We are loath to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves.

Ego strength includes being able to tolerate strong emotions, to keep focused under stress, to express yourself freely, to perceive reality accurately, and to make sound decisions.

The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and supported.

Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China's emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it.

Los principales elementos mortíferos para la humanidad en nuestra historia reciente -la viruela, la gripe, la tuberculosis, la malaria, la peste, el sarampión y el cólera- son enfermedades contagiosas que evolucionaron a partir de enfermedades de los animales, aún cuando la mayoría de los microbios responsables de nuestras enfermedades epidémicas estén ahora, paradójicamente, casi limitados a los seres humanos.

don't know whether Pertamina policies have changed since then.

The 10 countries with the most people (over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP) are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only country on both lists is the U.S.

From a patent lawyer's perspective, the ideal invention is one that arises without any precursors, like Athene springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. In

but receive much less social support from friendships

For instance, many wood and paper products that are offered to consumers for sale carry labels making pro-environmental claims such as "for every tree felled, at least two are planted." However, a survey of 80 such claims found that 77 could not be substantiated at all, 3 could be only partially substantiated, and almost all were withdrawn when challenged.

Montanans especially bristle at the geographically and psychologically remote federal government in Washington, D.C., telling them what to do. (But they don't bristle at the federal government's money, of which Montana receives and accepts about a dollar-and-a-half for every dollar sent from Montana to Washington.)

Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.