Quotes from Jared Diamond

7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Hence one can think of a crisis as a moment of truth: a turning point, when conditions before and after that "moment" are "much more" different from one another than before and after "most" other moments.

It does mean that it's going to require more conscious effort on the part of American political leaders and American voters to halt our gridlock than in other countries.

instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking "law enforcement" and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.

We tend to have strong inhibitions about being rude to a live human who is two feet away from us, and whom we can see and hear. But we lose those inhibitions when people are reduced to words on a screen.

We calculate that our urgings of the coauthors of those com- pleted volumes cost us on the average, per volume, two friendships for life and several more friendships for at least a decade.

But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.

That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn't arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else.

Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.

Something big and bad suddenly happening motivates us more than do slowly developing problems, and also more than the prospect of something big and bad happening in the future. I'm reminded of Samuel Johnson's saying: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Great-Man" view of the British historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who asserted that history is dominated by the deeds of great men, such as Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great.

the author Leo Tolstoy, who maintained that leaders and generals had minimal influence on the course of history. To make his point, Tolstoy included in his novel War and Peace fictitious accounts of battles in which generals issue orders, but the orders are irrelevant to what is actually happening on the battlefield.

First, Germany's devastated condition at the time of its surrender of May 7 and 8, 1945 posed the worst crisis faced by any nation discussed in this book. The erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, and the student revolts peaking over several months of 1968, then represented two further crises. Conversely, Perry's arrival in Japan and Pinochet's coup in Chile actually weren't unexpected

its contribution depends on a new framework derived from personal crises, an explicitly comparative approach, and a perspective drawn from my own life experiences and those of my friends.

averaged over many cases, leadership does tend to affect economic growth.

It turned out that successful attempts were more likely than unsuccessful attempts to be followed by a change in national political institutions.

leaders sometimes make a difference. But it depends on the type of leader, and on the type of effect examined.

Benjamin Jones at Northwestern University and Benjamin Olken of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.

The population that I already mentioned as having the world's lowest recorded salt intake, Brazil's Yanomamo Indians, also had the world's lowest average blood pressure, an astonishingly low 96 over 61.

The two populations with the next two lowest salt intakes, Brazil's Xingu Indians and Papua New Guinea Highlanders of the Asaro Valley, had the next two lowest blood pressures (100 over 62, and 108 over 63).

1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis.