“Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants. Dreamtime” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“As the masses lose their economic importance, will the moral argument alone be enough to protect human rights and liberties? Will elites… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Nobody in twelfth-century England knew what human rights were. You want to travel to the Middle East and risk your life not… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The right to the pursuit of happiness, originally envisaged as a restraint on state power, has imperceptibly morphed into the right to… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The nation is the imagined community of the state. The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market. Both are imagined… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Countries measured their success by the size of their territory, the increase in their population and the growth of their GDP –… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They… — 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
