“Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions. So it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Soviet Communism was a fanatical and missionary religion. A devout Communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist, and was expected… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
In Judaism or Christianity and so forth, you invent rules that don't exist anywhere except in your imagination. You spend your life… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Today, fewer and fewer people, including fewer and fewer Christians, agree with Jesus on this matter. Poverty is increasingly seen as a… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The Theory of Relativity makes nobody angry because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“To understand the rise of Christianity or the French Revolution, it is not enough to comprehend the interaction of genes, hormones and… — 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
“Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans… — 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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“Whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
