Quotes from Jared Diamond

Table 1.1. Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one's personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one's individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience

10. Flexible personality 11. Individual core values 12. Freedom from personal constraints

While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile.

In addition, in one of the largest child evacuations in history, 80,000 Finnish children were evacuated (mainly to Sweden), with long-lasting traumatic consequences extending to the next generation

WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies.

Japan is the one with the most equal division of wealth, and the one with proportionately the fewest billionaires in its population; the U.S. lies far at the opposite extreme in both respects.

Allende had good ideas, but he executed them poorly. Although he correctly recognized Chile's problems, he adopted wrong solutions to those problems.

The U.S. is very unlikely to suffer a take-over by our military acting independently. I 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.

It's the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world's approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or were only recently influenced by state government. Its populations span a range of traditional lifestyles, from nomadic hunter-gatherers, seafarers, and lowland sago specialists to settled Highland farmers, composing groups ranging from a few dozen to 200,000 people.

suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia.

The key word here is "selective." It's neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don't need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.

Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.

Para que una nación compuesta por millones de individuos divididos en grupos con perspectivas contrarias sobre la identidad de su territorio pueda responder a la pregunta de «¿quiénes somos?», hace falta mucho más que el paso del tiempo.

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

The "crisis" is a sudden realization of, or a sudden acting on, pressures that have been building up for a long time. This truth was acknowledged explicitly by Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who (as we'll see in Chapter 7) devised a whirlwind program of apparently major changes in 19 days of December 1972, but who downplayed his own reforms as a "recognition of what has already happened.

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.

Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance being murdered as the average human.

We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.