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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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"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."
"Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population."
"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."
"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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