“Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love. People are… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“An institution can call itself by whatever name it wants, but if it lacks a strong self-correcting mechanism, it is not a… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Science advances one funeral at a time. Only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This unique species, known by scientists as Homo floresiensis, reached a maximum height of only one metre and weighed no more than… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The history of science is replete with abandoned concepts and theories. For instance, early modern scientists who tried to account for the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This was the basis for the modern alliance between science and humanism, which kept the delicate balance between the modern yang and… — 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
“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
“However, the Scientific Revolution freed humankind from this conviction. The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Yet in practice, science and religion are like a husband and wife who after 500 years of marriage counselling still don’t know… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Indeed, even Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the other champions of the new scientific world view refuse to abandon liberalism. After dedicating… — 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
“Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Who knows if science will always be able to simultaneously save the economy from freezing and the ecology from boiling. And since… — 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
“single overarching theory that unifies all the scientific disciplines from musicology through economics to biology. According to Dataism, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism,… — 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
