It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseas….

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest ger….

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 murderer….

The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!.

In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it..

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that ev….

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use..

With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what ….

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few ….

Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather t….

I personally am not conscious of my accent..

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

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences am….

Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themse….

In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or c….

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home..

A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves..

Australia is the most isolated continent..

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I ….

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-t….

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single mo….