“Among all the world's large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Our late modern world prides itself on recognising, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent, taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence.… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“history does not tolerate a vacuum. If incidences of famine, plague and war are decreasing, something is bound to take their place… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“so why study history? unlike physics and economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Do you think that history professors chat about the reasons for World War One when they meet for lunch, or that nuclear… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline – the better you know a particular historical period,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural 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
“It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time. Today is… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
I was taught that if you're going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
In order to survive in a very small tribe, you needed to know how to do lots of things for yourself: how… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“It’s much the same dilemma that a future historian would face if he had to depict the social world of twenty-first-century teenagers… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“dawn of recorded history were pure, untouched by sin and unadulterated by other societies. But no culture since that dawn can reasonably… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“From a historical perspective, the spiritual journey is always tragic, for it is a lonely path fit for individuals rather than for… — 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
