“A large part of our artistic creativity, our political commitment and our religious piety is fuelled by the fear of death.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Conversely, the greatest sin would be to block the dataflow. What is death, if not a condition in which information doesn’t flow?” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“We want the ability to re-engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent, taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Doctor, what’s wrong with me?’ the doctor is likely to say, ‘Well, you have the flu,’ or ‘You have tuberculosis,’ or ‘You… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Throughout history, religions and ideologies did not sanctify life itself. They always sanctified something above or beyond earthly existence, and were consequently… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Moreover, most faiths turned death into the main source of meaning in life. Try to imagine Islam, Christianity or the ancient Egyptian… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Many anthropological and archaeological studies indicate that in simple agricultural societies with no political frameworks beyond village and tribe, human violence was… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.5 Yet the increase in births still… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Woody Allen, who has made a fabulous career out of the fear of death, was once asked if he hoped to live… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whereas in ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15 per cent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“We want the ability to re-engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“During the second half of the twentieth century this Law of the Jungle has finally been broken, if not rescinded. In most… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The prediction that in the twenty-first century humankind is likely to aim for immortality, bliss and divinity may anger, alienate or frighten… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The figures for 2002 are even more surprising. Out of 57 million dead, only 172,000 people died in war and 569,000 died… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Woody Allen, who has made a fabulous career out of the fear of death, was once asked if he hoped to live… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year. Its great achievement has been to… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“For similar reasons, archaic humans did not initiate any revolutions. As far as we can tell, changes in social patterns, the invention of new… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food. The advent of cooking enabled… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Whereas liberalism merged with the milder versions of nationalism to protect the unique experiences of each human community, evolutionary humanists such as Hitler identified… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Small children in affluent societies often dislike showering, and it takes them years of education and parental discipline to adopt this supposedly attractive custom.… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Soviet Communism was a fanatical and missionary religion. A devout Communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist, and was expected to spread… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“Yet what happens if the greedy shoemaker increases his profits by paying employees less and increasing their work hours? The standard answer is that… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
“A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share
