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Book: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Quotes of Book: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to His coattails as He marches past.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
Those parasites pass to a person from an eaten animal, but the virus causing laughing sickness {kuru} in the New Guinea highlands used to pass to a person from another person who was eaten. It was transmitted by cannibalism, when highland babies made the fatal mistake of licking their fingers after playing with raw brains that their mothers had just cut out of dead kuru victims awaiting cooking.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
large societies cannot function with band organization and instead are complex kleptocracies.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
history is not "just one damn fact after another," as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
my own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence {and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on} over 3,000 years later. One
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas,"
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Of
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.
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Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel
NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS TENDED TO INTERPRET history as a progression from savagery to civilization. Key hallmarks of this transition included the development of agriculture, metallurgy, complex technology, centralized government, and writing. Of these, writing was traditionally the one most restricted geographically: until the expansions of Islam and of colonial Europeans, it was absent from Australia, Pacific islands, subequatorial Africa, and the whole New World except for a small part of Mesoamerica. As
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