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"We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific."
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"There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself."

"There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said."

"More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors."

"And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again."
Explore more quotes by Jared Diamond

"Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north."

"I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons."

"The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources."

"No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment."

"Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this country."

"The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere."

"Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with."

"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 of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science."

"Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars."

"The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves."
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