“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
“A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Today, the 4-billion-year-old regime of natural selection is facing a completely different challenge. In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Most nations argue that they are a natural and eternal entity, created in some primordial epoch by mixing the soil of the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Aristotle argued that slaves have a ‘slavish nature’ whereas free people have a ‘free nature’. Their status in society is merely a… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The amount of energy stored in all the fossil fuel on earth is negligible compared to the amount that the sun dispenses… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
Science is telling us that the reason people die is not because some god said so or because the laws of nature… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The earth’s surface measures about 510 million square kilometres” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Nü Wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil,” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Nature, it was claimed, rewarded merit with wealth while penalising indolence.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. 2. Algorithmic calculations are not affected… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This law, known as dharma or dhamma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature. That ‘suffering arises from craving’… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction. But” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man.” — 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
