“If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“(Note the hunched position of the Egyptian farmer who, much like the ox, spent his life in hard labour oppressive to his… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“In the twentieth century we have almost doubled life expectancy from forty to seventy, so in the twenty-first century we should at… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon, this… — 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
“So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The third way to change the laws of life is to engineer completely inorganic beings. The most obvious examples are computer programs… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whereas traditionally the family was the main matchmaker, today it’s the market that tailors our romantic and sexual preferences, and then lends… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“It is the life sciences that concluded that organisms are algorithms. If this is not the case – if organisms function in… — 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
“The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“highly in a subjective well-being questionnaire. So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry… — 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
“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
