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Book: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Quotes of Book: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The
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  1. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    Клептократ і мудрий державний діяч, барон-грабіжник і громадський доброчинець відрізняються лише мірою: тобто тим, яку частку стягненої із виробників данини утримує еліта і наскільки простолюду подобається громадське використання, на яке спрямовується стягнена данина.
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  2. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part
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  3. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language groups {still with a mere 100,000 speakers} were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages. Each of those microsocieties alone was far too small to support chiefs and craft specialists, or to develop metallurgy and writing.
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  4. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    ONLY a few areas of the world developed food production independently, and they did so at widely differing times. From those nuclear areas, hunter-gatherers of some neighboring areas learned food production, and peoples of other neighboring areas were replaced by invading food producers from the nuclear areas-again at widely differing times. Finally, peoples of some areas ecologically suitable for food production neither evolved nor acquired agriculture in prehistoric times at all; they persisted as hunter-gatherers until the modern world finally swept upon them. The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history.
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  5. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history.
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  6. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific.
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  7. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.
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  8. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and {in some areas} the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents. The military uses of horses and camels, and the killing power of animal-derived germs, complete the list of major links between food production and conquest.
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  9. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    The humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly evolved germs, but those humans then evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases. When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed. Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals played decisive roles in the European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific islanders.
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  10. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers-typically, 10 to 100 times more-than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.
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  11. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject. While this book is thus ultimately
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  12. Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The

    plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers' domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
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