Jared Diamond Quotes

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

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 identifying the single most important problem!"

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

[..] the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent cause of disastrous behaviour. [...] The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense [...] It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined [...].

My views may seem to ignore a moral imperative that businesses should follow virtuous principles, whether or not it is most profitable for them to do so. Instead I prefer to recognize that, throughout human history, [...] government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be necessary for the enforcement of moral principles. Invocation of moral principles is a necessary first step for eliciting virtuous behavior, but that alone is not a sufficient step.

Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practising behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.