...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Jared Diamond
About This Quote

The world is complex. It takes effort to become more clear about life and history.

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart. - Kiera Cass
  2. Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. - Willa Cather
  3. Learning the truth has become my life's love. - Dan Brown
  4. I am not a victim. No matter what I have been through, I'm still here. I have a history of victory. - Steve Maraboli
  5. It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all. - Jim Hinckley
More Quotes By Jared Diamond
  1. [W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
  2. Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
  3. Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] 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...
  4. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database...
  5. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
Related Topics