“Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable. Yet the compression brings a compensating benefit: long-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies.”

—  Jared Diamond , book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), p. 408

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page pe…" by Jared Diamond?
Jared Diamond photo
Jared Diamond 33
American scientist and author 1937

Related quotes

Amit Chaudhuri photo

“Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Rajendra K. Pachauri photo

“[To help combat climate change] Give up meat for one day (per week) initially, and decrease it from there. In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity.”

Rajendra K. Pachauri (1940–2020) Indian academic

“Eat less red meat to help the environment, UN climate expert says,” interview with The Telegraph (7 September 2008) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2699173/Eat-less-red-meat-to-help-the-environment-UN-climate-expert-says.html

Gordon Moore photo

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year… Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.”

Gordon Moore (1929) American businessman, co-founder of Intel and author of the eponym law

[1965, ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, PDF, 4, Electronics Magazine, 3 February 2010]

George Sand photo

“We cannot tear a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.”

George Sand book Mauprat

Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu.
Source: Mauprat, ch. 11 (1837); Matilda M. Hays (trans.) Mauprat (London: E. Churton, 1847) p. 121

“You kill, with a single gas canister, an average of five hundred criminals per day!”

Luiz Carlos Alborghetti (1945–2009) Italian-Brazilian radio commenter, showman and political figure

Original: (pt) Você mata, com um botijão de gás, uma média de 500 bandidos por dia!
Original: (pt) Source: [9 December 2009, Morre Luiz Carlos Alborghetti, dono do bordão 'bandido bom é bandido morto', https://extra.globo.com/tv-e-lazer/morre-luiz-carlos-alborghetti-dono-do-bordao-bandido-bom-bandido-morto-209786.html, Portuguese, Extra, Editora Globo S/A, 31 March 2019]

J. C. R. Licklider photo

“One must be prepared to reject not only the schema of the physical library, which is essentially a response to books and their proliferation, but the schema of the book itself, and even that of the printed page as a long term storage device, if one is to discover the kinds of procognitive systems needed in the future.”

J. C. R. Licklider Libraries of the future

As cited in: Ching-chih Chen (1980) Quantitative measurement and dynamic library service. p. 52.
Libraries of the future, 1965

C. Wright Mills photo

“[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

Source: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 31, commenting on the verbosity of the chief work of competing sociologist Talcott Parsons.

Lloyd deMause photo

“There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, p. 86.

Boris Yeltsin photo

“History demonstrates that it is a dangerous delusion to suppose that the destinies of continents and of the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Address https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1994-12-06-9412050445-story.html to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Budapest opposing the expansion of NATO (6 December 1994)
1990s

Related topics