Yuval Noah Harari

“Every human being is a singular ray of light that illuminates the world from a different perspective, and that adds colour, depth…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“humans may be unable to do so. The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Archaeologists have discovered sites where entire herds were butchered annually in such ways. There are even sites where fences and obstacles were…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Homo Sapiens Loses Control Can humans go on running the world and giving it meaning? How do biotechnology and artificial intelligence threaten…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk,…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Really powerful human organisations – such as pharaonic Egypt, communist China, the European empires and the modern school system – are not…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Males must prove their masculinity constantly, throughout their lives, from cradle to grave, in an endless series of rites and performances. And…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Nobody really knows how to solve this thorny question of cultural inheritance. Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“alongside seas and rivers rich in seafood and waterfowl, humans set up permanent fishing villages – the first permanent settlements in history,…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“The great political, artistic, and religious project of modernity has been to find a meaning to life that is not rooted in…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“And whereas you quickly forget most of what you read, Amazon will never forget a thing. Such data will enable Amazon to…

— Yuval Noah Harari

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information,…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Bees don’t need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution. The queen does not…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as…

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

“A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Timeline of History Years Before the Present 13.5 billion Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script,…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“However, in the twenty-first century the majority of both men and women might lose their military and economic value. Gone is the…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Yet over the last few decades the tables have turned, and Bentham’s vision has been taken far more seriously. People increasingly believe…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“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

“European conquerors knew their empires very well. Far better, indeed, than any previous conquerors, or even than the native population itself. Their…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“large systems of cooperation that involve not twenty-two but thousands or even millions of humans require the handling and storage of huge…

— Yuval Noah Harari

“Poverty certainly causes many other health problems, and malnutrition shortens life expectancy even in the richest countries on earth. In France, for…

— Yuval Noah Harari