Yuval Noah Harari Quotes

to eat and drink in moderation, and to curb one's sexual appetites. In the long run, a deep friendship will make us more content than a frenzied orgy.

Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far. There

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.2 Who

We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.

issued a ban on drug trafficking, but

The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any

in many societies more people are in danger of dying from obesity than from starvation.

Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.

The name 'denarius' became a generic name for coins.

Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In

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

In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.5

Thanks to money, even people who don't know each other and don't trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

Henceforth, people became obsessed with the idea that machines and engines could be used to convert one type of energy into another.

Peasants had to work harder than foragers to eke out less varied and nutritious food, and they were far more exposed to disease and exploitation.

The amount of energy stored in all the fossil fuel on earth is negligible compared to the amount that the sun dispenses every day, free of charge.

to plunder, slaughter and robbery they give the lying name of empire;

Similar probabilistic models have become central to economics, sociology, psychology, political science and the other social and natural sciences.

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!

the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another. Those

{Photo: The Upper Galilee Museum of Prehistory.}

Consequently, from the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.

Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But

Those more deeply informed about the period are much more cognisant of the roads not taken.

The Human Brain Project,

perhaps happiness is synchronising one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.

the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.

History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten

money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance.

The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes

To describe 'how' means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another.

A lot of evidence indicates that we are destroying the foundations of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.

about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country's population, were opium addicts.

A German vegetarian might well prefer to marry a French vegetarian than a German carnivore.

The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want.

The first principle of Buddhism is 'Suffering exists. How do I escape it?' Buddhism

We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem,

which will enable either a human or an automatic operator to control the insect's movements remotely and to absorb and transmit information.

Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.

When the gods created man, Gilgamesh had learned, they set death as man's inevitable destiny, and man must learn to live with it.

Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep.

To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.

200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals.

The supreme commandment of the rich is 'Invest!' The supreme commandment of the rest of us is 'Buy!' The

Biology enables, Culture forbids.

100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.

Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The

between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo's population).

They argue for a reverse correlation between human capabilities and happiness. Power

Harlow's monkeys,

The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called 'writing'.

Cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.

we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question:

When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate

Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.

If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'. On

Every point in history is a crossroads. A

What's undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the Problem of Evil.

The social norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths.

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing

the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In

Two million years ago, genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus.

Russian, Japanese and Korean scientists has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths,

Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

A person who does not crave cannot suffer. According

Sex is child's play; but gender is serious business.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.

People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction. But

Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns.

the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer. All

the details of every legal proceeding

The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The

Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout

Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.

Religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order.

The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We

For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat.

they make a desert and call it peace'.

Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts.

Behind the meteoric rise of both science and empire lurks one particularly important force: capitalism. Were

years, making it the most durable

Yet the world of 2014 is already a world in which culture is releasing itself from the shackles of biology. Our

Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair.

Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People

Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller than that of today's Cairo.

we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.

Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian bio-artist, decided in 2000 to create a new work of art: a fluorescent green rabbit.

It is hard to find a good survival strategy that will work simultaneously against multiple threats.

Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.

It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1

plan to take a fertilised egg-cell of a present-day elephant, replace the elephantine DNA with a reconstructed mammoth DNA,

a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.

The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to.