Top 100 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes
#1. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.
Yuval Noah Harari
#2. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When
Yuval Noah Harari
#3. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From
Yuval Noah Harari
#4. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.
Yuval Noah Harari
#5. Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.
Yuval Noah Harari
#6. for the vast majority of life's necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The
Yuval Noah Harari
#7. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself.
Yuval Noah Harari
#9. Without such knowledge, it is unlikely that a ridiculously small number of Britons could have succeeded in governing, oppressing and exploiting so many hundreds of millions of Indians for two centuries. Throughout
Yuval Noah Harari
#10. Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her.
Yuval Noah Harari
#11. Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts. Why
Yuval Noah Harari
#12. They argue for a reverse correlation between human capabilities and happiness. Power
Yuval Noah Harari
#13. Woody Allen, who has made a fabulous career out of the fear of death, was once asked if he hoped to live on for ever through the silver screen. Allen answered that 'I'd rather live on in my apartment.
Yuval Noah Harari
#14. DNA is not an autocrat. Animal behaviour is also influenced by environmental factors and individual quirks.
Yuval Noah Harari
#15. happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.
Yuval Noah Harari
#16. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
Yuval Noah Harari
#17. the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.
Yuval Noah Harari
#18. Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.
Yuval Noah Harari
#20. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.
Yuval Noah Harari
#21. We normally think that theist religions sanctified the great gods. We tend to forget that they sanctified humans, too. Hitherto Homo sapiens had been just one actor in a cast of thousands. In the new theist drama, Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe revolved.
Yuval Noah Harari
#22. Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?
Yuval Noah Harari
#23. An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. An algorithm isn't a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.
Yuval Noah Harari
#24. Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe,
Yuval Noah Harari
#25. Many of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. They did not release their slaves upon signing the Declaration, nor did they consider themselves hypocrites. In their view, the rights of men had little to do with Negroes. The
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#26. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets.
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#27. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money.
Yuval Noah Harari
#28. If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.
Yuval Noah Harari
#30. Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.
Yuval Noah Harari
#31. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
Yuval Noah Harari
#32. Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, 'us vs them', and to foresee the potential unity of humankind.
Yuval Noah Harari
#33. Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics.
Yuval Noah Harari
#34. We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In
Yuval Noah Harari
#35. Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who had ascended to the throne on his grandfather's death, realised that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading towards bankruptcy.
Yuval Noah Harari
#36. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
Yuval Noah Harari
#37. In such a band, a woman could have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and women) simultaneously, and all of the band's adults cooperated in parenting its children.
Yuval Noah Harari
#38. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout
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#39. At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e. those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals.
Yuval Noah Harari
#40. This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner.
Yuval Noah Harari
#41. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and that it is changing our world beyond recognition.
Yuval Noah Harari
#42. At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.
Yuval Noah Harari
#44. human handprint made about 30,000 years ago, on the wall of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France. Somebody tried to say, 'I was here!
Yuval Noah Harari
#45. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations. Ever
Yuval Noah Harari
#46. The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.
Yuval Noah Harari
#47. To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be
Yuval Noah Harari
#48. We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
Yuval Noah Harari
#49. A German vegetarian might well prefer to marry a French vegetarian than a German carnivore.
Yuval Noah Harari
#50. Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
Yuval Noah Harari
#51. country devoid of natural resources, but which enjoys peace, a fair judicial system and a free government is likely to receive a high credit rating. As such, it may be able to raise enough cheap capital to support a good education system and foster a flourishing high-tech industry. The
Yuval Noah Harari
#52. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten
Yuval Noah Harari
#53. The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.
Yuval Noah Harari
#54. The first principle of Buddhism is 'Suffering exists. How do I escape it?' Buddhism
Yuval Noah Harari
#55. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminium cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold knives and forks.
Yuval Noah Harari
#56. The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry
Yuval Noah Harari
#57. Similar probabilistic models have become central to economics, sociology, psychology, political science and the other social and natural sciences.
Yuval Noah Harari
#58. Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People
Yuval Noah Harari
#59. how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?
Yuval Noah Harari
#60. The social norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths.
Yuval Noah Harari
#61. The first principle of monotheist religions is 'God exists. What does He want from me?' The first principle of Buddhism is 'Suffering exists. How do I escape it?
Yuval Noah Harari
#62. The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.
Yuval Noah Harari
#63. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God's love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours.
Yuval Noah Harari
#64. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?
Yuval Noah Harari
#65. we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.
Yuval Noah Harari
#67. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.
Yuval Noah Harari
#68. One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance. For
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#69. To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.
Yuval Noah Harari
#70. People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money. Osama Bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture, American religion and American politics, was very fond of American dollars. How did money succeed where gods and kings failed?
Yuval Noah Harari
#71. Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'.
Yuval Noah Harari
#72. which will enable either a human or an automatic operator to control the insect's movements remotely and to absorb and transmit information.
Yuval Noah Harari
#73. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology ('Just do it!') to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression. It
Yuval Noah Harari
#74. Russian, Japanese and Korean scientists has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths,
Yuval Noah Harari
#75. Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.
Yuval Noah Harari
#76. The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance.
Yuval Noah Harari
#77. the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.
Yuval Noah Harari
#79. Treating living creatures possessing complex emotional worlds as if they were machines is likely to cause them not only physical discomfort, but also much social stress and psychological frustration.
Yuval Noah Harari
#81. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
Yuval Noah Harari
#82. Without recourse to eternal souls and a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens.
Yuval Noah Harari
#83. Cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.
Yuval Noah Harari
#84. Science needs more than just research to make progress. It depends on the mutual reinforcement of science, politics and economics.
Yuval Noah Harari
#85. Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.
Yuval Noah Harari
#86. At heart, the Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. It
Yuval Noah Harari
#87. perhaps happiness is synchronising one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.
Yuval Noah Harari
#88. No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.
Yuval Noah Harari
#89. Religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order.
Yuval Noah Harari
#90. The average person might well be no happier today than in 1800. Even the freedom we value so highly may be working against us. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbors, but they can choose to leave us.
Yuval Noah Harari
#91. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
Yuval Noah Harari
#92. Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference.
Yuval Noah Harari
#93. About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.
Yuval Noah Harari
#94. A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn't vocal.
Yuval Noah Harari
#95. Those living in palaces have always had different agendas to those living in shacks, and that is unlikely to change in the twenty-first century.
Yuval Noah Harari
#96. The supreme commandment of the rich is 'Invest!' The supreme commandment of the rest of us is 'Buy!' The
Yuval Noah Harari
#97. diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples (such as the Numantians), forging out of them new
Yuval Noah Harari
#98. The Maoris, New Zealand's first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species.
Yuval Noah Harari
#99. 200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals.
Yuval Noah Harari
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