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"We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about."
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"In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine."

"I'm going down in history with Star Trek. It's a great feeling."

"I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally."

"The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene."

"Everything will turn into a ruin, even your beliefs will turn into a ruin! There will be no more believers from your belief, there will be only the viewers around your belief, watching this belief of once upon a time, and now just a ruin!"

"I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past."

"Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won."
Explore more quotes by Jared Diamond

"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."

"Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands."

"I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history."

"We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific."

"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."
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