Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (also titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) is a 2005 book by Jared M. Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles. Diamond's book deals with "societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses" (p. 15). In writing the book Diamond intended that its readers should learn from history (p. 23).

Read more about Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or SucceedSynopsis, Book Structure, Reviews, Similar Theories, Film

Famous quotes containing the words societies, choose and/or fail:

    It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.”
    Germaine Greer (b. 1939)

    For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)